The National Security Branch carries out the FBI’s responsibilities as the lead intelligence and law enforcement agency in the nation to detect, deter, and disrupt national security threats to the United States and its interests. Our goal is to collect, analyze, and share intelligence to develop a comprehensive understanding of—and to defeat—national security threats directed against the United States while preserving civil liberties.
We continue to refine our intelligence capabilities to position ourselves to stay ahead of the evolving threats our nation faces. Intelligence directs how we understand threats, how we prioritize and investigate these threats, and how we target our resources to address them.
To ensure success, we continue to integrate our intelligence and law enforcement capabilities in every operational program. The traditional distinction between national security and criminal matters is increasingly blurred as terrorists commit crimes to finance their activities and computer hackers create vulnerabilities that can be exploited. The integration of intelligence and investigations makes the FBI uniquely situated to address these threats and vulnerabilities across programs. The FBI draws on both intelligence and law enforcement tools to determine strategically where and when to disrupt threats.
Is it just me or does a reasonable reading of this statement imply that a big part of the FBI's mission is to help eliminate vulnerabilities in software used by American citizens and companies? Is there an interpretation in which they are credibly following their own mission statement?
Hey, that whole gravity thing could be bogus! I know other researchers have verified it thousands of times, but maybe they're wrong. Let's just do some calibration tests every day in the lab to be sure stuff doesn't randomly start floating UP instead of falling down. After all, we can't accept consensus!
The existing consensus on gravity has been overthrown before. Your 1001st gravitational calibration tests might be the one finally sensitive enough to detect that Newtonian gravity is incorrect.
"Well, I was going to do a chemistry experiment today, but I don't really believe that whole atomic theory of matter. I mean, there's 'consensus' on the idea that molecules are made up of atoms, and a substance has consistent properties based on that. But maybe water isn't really made up of H2O. Maybe if I zap it with electricity, it will turn out that it's actually made of microscopic gnomes! The gnomes could be magically giving the illusion of molecular structure. Before I start my chem experiments, I need to be sure my hypothetical gnomes aren't going to ruin the properties of my solvent. So let's test for gnomes every day!"
If your 'gnome' turns out to be nucleons and electrons, you would be right to challenge the atom ("indivisible") view. Or if it refers to polymeric chains comprised of H2O subunits. Zapping water with electricity does have important effects. It can decompose it into hydrogen and oxygen, it can restructure the arrangement of the molecules. Water is fairly sensitive to such effects.
The trouble with relying on consensus is that the scientific refinements we are searching for are precisely those which have eluded our previous knowledge and intuition.
My counter to
Consensus is PART of the scientific method. It's the only way we actually get to DO "science".
is that consensus is the enemy of the scientific method. People have been studying the universe as long as there has been people. Why did the scientific method spark so much progress? Because it disregarded consensus. The scientific method didn't care what Aristotle and all the intellectual giants had written about science, it said anything was fair game to be contested and disproven. Humanity was no longer beholden to oligarchy of thinkers in deciding what could and could not be so.
I don't disagree that there is something practical in establishing broad consensus. We have to choose which experiments we want to perform. Sometimes that is done by Senate committees. Sometimes it is done by individuals. We have finite resources and have to spend them wisely, and so science inherits a political aspect. But is that really in keeping with the scientific method? I think that's more of a practical sacrifice to achieve social goals. But scientists should always remember that the essence of their practice is in subjecting human conjecture to every suspicion, to be vindicated only by relentless experiment. And political expedience or no, I would hope there would always be a small contingent of holdouts against every theory, just to make sure we never find ourselves permanently entrenched in a pocket of false truths.
People game systems, whether it is government employees realizing they can minimize effort, companies realizing they can maximize payout, or politicians realizing they can appease their constituents. The problem with government is that it creates the system to be gamed and has too much inertia to self-correct in a reasonable way. Properly constructed market solutions are cost effective because the players themselves punish bad pricing and inefficiency. That can of course be gamed as well, but if government concentrates on punishing bad actors instead of on rigging or monopolizing the system, it seems you get the best result. But I think it's fair to blame 'government' for creating projects subject to abusive bids. If your system "would work," but only if "everyone behaves in the most honest self-denying way," it's unfortunately a stupid system.
There has only been one national poll so far that has shown a GOP candidate beating Hillary, but it was within the margin of error. If the democrats nominate Sanders, however, it will be a GOP bloodbath as he beats the GOP candidates by much more than the margin of error.
I think you are missing some important facts about how these elections work. Name recognition is a huge factor. Hillary Clinton has been in the national spotlight for decades, and in a rather major way.
The Republicans have been splitting the attention between what was initially 17 people (I don't know what it's whittled down to right now) and even then the media has been consistently providing Trump with more attention than all the others combined.
Once a frontrunner is chosen they will inherit quite a bit of media and voter attention as well as advertising for their national campaign. That part of Hillary's advantage will largely dissipate. Hillary also will be subject to greater scrutiny. People polled may not know anything about her as a candidate other than that they liked her husband. Once they have some information, their candidate preference may well change. (And I think probably will in many cases.)
Your polling predictions are all based on data which has little or nothing to do with the political context we'll have in November.
This is important because the other side of the coin is large groups of people who don't know anyone who is siding with Apple. Fyi to all of us, we really don't have much ground to gripe about the world having technically illiterate opinions if we never expose them to literate opinions. And that means making friends with people who know nothing about technology and entering their social circles. We can of course have discussions amongst ourselves on Slashdot, but unless your grandpa reads Slashdot, you haven't accomplished anything in the way of influencing the general public.
Both Democrats and Republicans do gerrymandering whenever they can get away with it, but the process works better for Republicans because they are less concentrated: Even the reddest of red districts (say a rural county in Utah) have only about 70% Republicans, but it is easy to find urban districts that are 95% Democrat.
What defines "gerrymandering"? A square grid of districts would have no human bias but by your observation would greatly favor Republicans. You have to think carefully about where the lines go if you want to make sure those high-density Democrat areas have influence spread across multiple districts. Doesn't that mean that gerrymandering works better for Democrats?
They are attempting to have some principles regarding where they get funding - if they can't demonstrate their ability to function without Exxon funding, it calls into question whether or not Exxon has influence over their publications.
Who has more liberty to pursue their own ideas, someone funded by a thousand different donors with independent rationales, or someone funded by one or two organizations? Or will they also show their intellectual independence by dropping all their other funding sources?
We've used ancient structures as quarries. Used mummies as medicine. Shakespearean manuscripts have been burned for fuel by the unwitting. Fossil fields ground up. As unlikely as it may seem, it actually wouldn't be terrible to give some occasional thought to whether there is anything useful being lost in the salt mines.
If you want to say it's shockingly bad, first establish what a proper percentage should be. It is apparently a similar result to other basic science questions in which Americans may out-perform other countries:
To the question "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed [Americans] answered incorrectly. . . . Only 66 percent of people in a 2005 European Union poll answered the basic astronomy question correctly. However, both China and the EU fared significantly better (66 percent and 70 percent, respectively) on the question about human evolution.
What result should we expect when surveying a large population of non-STEM individuals who, received their science education (if any) 40 years ago under different standards and haven't looked back since, may not ever have achieved high school diploma, may not have the reasoning skills to understand abstract scientific theories, or may just be joshing with the pollster? What result are we striving for? And, most importantly, how will achieving that result affect our scientific output?
I am open to the idea that this represents a significant problem, but I have a suspicion that it is really not as big of an issue as people who live-and-breath science like to perceive. Some hard data on the externalities would be nice.
Cycling is a bit special as a longer endurance sport. There's more to be gained from marginal benefits. That said, cheating is very wide spread. It's a constant race between athletes and analysts. You often can't detect a new strategy of cheating until someone is physically caught and then you can develop an analytical method to do so. Lance Armstrong was caught not by the technology of the time but by revisiting blood samples which had been stored. Athletes may content themselves with microdoping where they use very small doses of drugs or reserved blood to evade detection limits. It obviously is less effective, but they're looking for whatever edge they can get. With small alterations it becomes difficult to distinguish between artificial enhancement and genetic anomalies. If you don't hear about people cheating I think it has a lot to do with them getting very good at it.
Depends on whether you are talking about "free speech" as an American legal concept or "free speech" as a philosophic good.
Sure, the government is the biggest bully in town and it minimizes a lot of potential harm if it is required to play nice. But if all "freedom of speech" is to you is a promise to be harangued, fired, and/or murdered only by people unaffiliated with the government, then it's obvious that you don't appreciate freedom for freedom's sake.
In my opinion requiring companies and people to go out of their way to provide equal platforms, etc., would lead to worse abuses. So I don't think that there should be any requirement placed on person or companies to transmit or support your views. But I still say a society where people use their private power and influence to purposefully squelch the views of others is intrinsically unfree. Same as how, even with slavery outlawed, as a black you were not really enjoying equal rights and protections in the post-Civil War South. Not while the society itself was determined to deny those to you.
Over a broad enough time span that is true -- the right has wished to stifle communist and anti-religious speech, etc. They also, in relatively greater proportion, support blurring nudity and beeping out a handful of words broadcast on public channels.
But realistically censorship, particularly of ideas, is now a weapon sought and wielded by the cultural left. That may largely be a practical consideration -- they have predominant influence over media and public education and so are the ones who benefit most from claiming the right to stamp out minority views. However, it remains they are the ones most likely to tell you that you can't publish an editorial in the college paper because it is insensitive, that you should be fired from your job and stripped of your recognition because of something you said, that you be disinvited from speaking because your views are not in line with those they feel comfortable with.
The left should be conscious of this and attempt to fix it, for the general good, because some day the pendulum will swing the other way again, and to avoid pushing out their civil libertarians.
Law enforcement receives substantial additional vehicle training and have lights and sirens to make other drivers aware when they responding to an emergency or blocking an intersection. Law enforcement is allowed to carry restricted firearms and to do so in restricted areas (such as bars) while on duty, but again they have substantial additional training and are performing a specific function. The conditions for legally discharging their firearms are pretty much the same as for you or I.
The privileges of a licensed police officer are comparable to those of other licensed professionals. E.g., a surgeon or a commercial airline pilot can do things that most others (including cops) could not do legally, but because they are specially equipped to do so in a beneficent manner.
However, neither a surgeon, airline pilot, or police officer is entitled to use their special dispensations to do anything malignant. The issue here is that disseminating child pornography is understood to directly and/or indirectly harm children. The police should not have the option of using that or even of idly allowing that to occure in order to obtain their convictions, any more than it would be okay for them letting a murder go forward so they could bring up murder charges.
I think taking over the website is a valid sting. But they should not have provided the actual images once it was in their capacity to prevent them from being distributed. If that results in less evidence collected, so be it. Protecting the innocent is of higher priority than maximizing justice.
But the people who make the decisions about who is going to be killed already may never set foot on the battlefield. And veterans aren't to my knowledge the major component of war protesters.
On the other hand remote combat (theoretically) removes much of the incentive for killing. If you are out on the battlefield, killing is how you guarantee your personal survival. Armies have historically dealt with non-violent acts such as desertion with on-site execution of their own men because of their own personal stakes in victory. We even accept "I was afraid for my life" as a justification to kill back at home. But that argument doesn't work if you are safe in an office controlling a robot. With robots you can justify waiting to see if the person reaching for their pocket is going to pull out a gun or a detonator. You can justify non-lethal response even if it is.
Not saying we will automatically pursue that. But it's a possible future, given the technology.
I disagree, we are ever in search of causes, precisely because our body of facts great exceeds our body of explanations. Some facts, such as quantum randomness, seem to explicitly exceed our ability to link a previous state to the final state except by statistical description.
Taking it for granted that we can uniquely relate all effects that we have observed with prior causes -- and even that we will never encounter a future exception -- on what basis can we assume this would apply when the universe was in a fundamentally different situation? In fact, we know some of our existing assumptions must break down, and it is one of the standing problems to understand how. But how can you assign a probability to rules like cause and effect under unknown conditions? Inside the scope of a basketball game, you can estimate the probability that a player, or a group of players, will score. What good is that estimate if I tell you their next game will be a newly invented sport with unknown rules?
But I think it's fine to assume things like an ultimate cause or chain of causes. It's not science, because it's not subject to observational inquiry. However, it may still be true. I just don't think it's something we can state as having to be true.
"Extreme" has different contexts but a political extreme almost certainly refers to views far removed from those generally held. According to your interpretation, someone who supports "some genocide" has adopted a moderate position and someone who is totally against genocide is an extremist. You can rationalize that usage if you have a specific purpose to do so but it's obviously not the common usage.
In the US, advocating significant gun restrictions is an extreme position. Globally, it is not. Select euthanasia is moderate position by polling (although not very popular as actual legal policy). The American's left's views on abortion are very extreme both globally and locally. The right fosters some extreme views as well but realistically the political discussion of abortion in the US is almost exclusively about the second and third trimester and it is the right which (collectively) seeks the more moderate policies.
Want to pursue a STEM or other high-paying degree? No problem, but you have to pay a lot more for your degree.
Isn't paying more for something that's worth more just normal market behavior? For that matter, engineering and science programs typically also cost the school more, but are somewhat subsidized by tuition from cheaper humanities programs.
That said, there is the issue that engineering degrees are also more valuable to society, which may want to provide its own incentives.
My idea: involve the employers in these ISAs. Plenty of employers already cover tuition in exchange for working a set number of years with them (including the U.S. government). Universities can act like unions, doing collective bargaining on behalf of the students (I am not assuming the universities' intrinsic benevolence here, but presumably students will choose to go to universities which can get them the best deals). Conversely, government and businesses might do a much better job of bargaining down tuition prices than loan subsidied college students have been doing. And instead of gambling on the future, students enter into the arrangement knowing exactly when they are going to be able to afford a mortgage. There are plenty of potential problems, but I think the present process of "guess a good major to land a job from an unspecified employer and make indefinite earnings and by the way your wager is $100k and 4-6 years of your life" leaves a lot to improve.
In the world in which doctors are constantly evaluating all humans for all conditions, I agree with you. But "the average slob" does not go to see the doctor unless he is dying, and when he is dying, his bladder/hairloss/libido issues may not come up.
"end users, ask your sysadmin if systemd is right for you."
"End users, there is this thing called VPN which lets you do your work offsite. Ask your sysadmin if you want privileges enabled on your account."
The amazing part is that most people don't consider it as a disease to be eradicated.
Clearly, plenty do. There's always some "disease to be eradicated." It could be a religion or other ideology, or an ethnicity. If you haven't had your turn yet to dig the mass graves I'm sure as time goes on the opportunity will arise. Then your ideological allies (if you're not around) can go about eradicating the disease and ushering in the new paradise. It's funny how eliminating these undesirable elements of humanity and thought never seems to produce the promised paradise, however. But I'm sure it will work for you.
If the police failed to act on information a rape or murder was planned because they wanted to catch the perpetrator in the act, there would be outcry. You don't jeopardize the safety of the innocent to assail the (potentially) guilty. Collecting foreign intelligence is not more important than heading off immediate threats to domestic citizens. Clearly the NSA views it as all about "catching the bad guy" and has forgotten the reason the bad guys are considered bad. It's like SWAT leaving a bomb in a public building because, "Hey, maybe we could trip it when the bad guys get back."
Don't store anything on the laptop. The fact they can legally compel you to provide the means of data access means you are in trouble in every case which they have possession of both you and your laptop. You can either do a really good job of hiding the data or you can keep it outside of where they can get it. How about a remote server a trusted person can deactivate if they hear about your situation?
But the time we set our clocks to has no bearing on levels of sunlight, that's just how we originally began measuring it. We can start our days at 8am as well as we can start them at 7am. Apparently we really like being able to have everyone in large (but not too large) geographic regions say they 'start work at 7' and that 'Spongebob will be on at 9.' Whatever reasons we have for that, are they reasons which are going to fall apart if things shift by 1 second every couple of years? I'm guessing not.
Probably, yes. The development of space exploration could be basically credited to the occurrence of the the second world war. Does that indicate the need for more world wars to advance human civilization?
Anecdotal evidence is inherently flawed here because, no matter what route we had taken, we could always point to whatever we did achieve and say "we wouldn't have that if we had done something else" and not be aware of anything we might have created instead. So it's a kind of evidence that can only support the status quo.
Personally, I think it's obvious that a global communications network was inevitable. The internet was not even the first thing which could be called that. There are various reasons it could actually have benefited us to develop the technology later and/or in a different way. What if we wound up with all data and communications encrypted by default, for example? The internet is great but its existence in its present form is not a proof that society needs to progress through projects undertaken by our department of defense.
The real question is how much *general progress* results from dollars invested in NSF grants etc. verses dollars invested in other ways. That's a difficult enough question that is probably a lot of fair points to be made either way. But by all means lets try to qualify what a dollar of public research spending gets us. We may decide we want to keep public research but still reform how it is set up.
You can always work cheaper than a robot. Whatever a robot costs, there's nothing stopping you from charging less (well, except minimum wage laws). How will you afford to eat? Because thanks to the fact food is now produced by robots and supercheap labor, it doesn't cost very much any more.
People will always be exchanging things. Money facilitates that. It won't ever become the barrier preventing it. What really drives people away from menial labor is having better job options to where trying to outbid robots is not appealing.
"Look, we've already put a trip to the Bahamas in our itinerary, the only thing we can reasonably do now is sign up for more credit cards."
The economists promise us there are complicated economic reasons why our present debt is good, or at least not bad, and I'm not saying they are wrong (I'm not educated enough to do so). But I don't think the domestic analogy is the way to go if you want to defend that position.
Newtonian mechanics is not going to explain how the cat is both dead and alive.
Slashdot Mirror
According to their website
The National Security Branch carries out the FBI’s responsibilities as the lead intelligence and law enforcement agency in the nation to detect, deter, and disrupt national security threats to the United States and its interests. Our goal is to collect, analyze, and share intelligence to develop a comprehensive understanding of—and to defeat—national security threats directed against the United States while preserving civil liberties.
We continue to refine our intelligence capabilities to position ourselves to stay ahead of the evolving threats our nation faces. Intelligence directs how we understand threats, how we prioritize and investigate these threats, and how we target our resources to address them.
To ensure success, we continue to integrate our intelligence and law enforcement capabilities in every operational program. The traditional distinction between national security and criminal matters is increasingly blurred as terrorists commit crimes to finance their activities and computer hackers create vulnerabilities that can be exploited. The integration of intelligence and investigations makes the FBI uniquely situated to address these threats and vulnerabilities across programs. The FBI draws on both intelligence and law enforcement tools to determine strategically where and when to disrupt threats.
Is it just me or does a reasonable reading of this statement imply that a big part of the FBI's mission is to help eliminate vulnerabilities in software used by American citizens and companies? Is there an interpretation in which they are credibly following their own mission statement?
Hey, that whole gravity thing could be bogus! I know other researchers have verified it thousands of times, but maybe they're wrong. Let's just do some calibration tests every day in the lab to be sure stuff doesn't randomly start floating UP instead of falling down. After all, we can't accept consensus!
The existing consensus on gravity has been overthrown before. Your 1001st gravitational calibration tests might be the one finally sensitive enough to detect that Newtonian gravity is incorrect.
"Well, I was going to do a chemistry experiment today, but I don't really believe that whole atomic theory of matter. I mean, there's 'consensus' on the idea that molecules are made up of atoms, and a substance has consistent properties based on that. But maybe water isn't really made up of H2O. Maybe if I zap it with electricity, it will turn out that it's actually made of microscopic gnomes! The gnomes could be magically giving the illusion of molecular structure. Before I start my chem experiments, I need to be sure my hypothetical gnomes aren't going to ruin the properties of my solvent. So let's test for gnomes every day!"
If your 'gnome' turns out to be nucleons and electrons, you would be right to challenge the atom ("indivisible") view. Or if it refers to polymeric chains comprised of H2O subunits. Zapping water with electricity does have important effects. It can decompose it into hydrogen and oxygen, it can restructure the arrangement of the molecules. Water is fairly sensitive to such effects.
The trouble with relying on consensus is that the scientific refinements we are searching for are precisely those which have eluded our previous knowledge and intuition.
My counter to
Consensus is PART of the scientific method. It's the only way we actually get to DO "science".
is that consensus is the enemy of the scientific method. People have been studying the universe as long as there has been people. Why did the scientific method spark so much progress? Because it disregarded consensus. The scientific method didn't care what Aristotle and all the intellectual giants had written about science, it said anything was fair game to be contested and disproven. Humanity was no longer beholden to oligarchy of thinkers in deciding what could and could not be so.
I don't disagree that there is something practical in establishing broad consensus. We have to choose which experiments we want to perform. Sometimes that is done by Senate committees. Sometimes it is done by individuals. We have finite resources and have to spend them wisely, and so science inherits a political aspect. But is that really in keeping with the scientific method? I think that's more of a practical sacrifice to achieve social goals. But scientists should always remember that the essence of their practice is in subjecting human conjecture to every suspicion, to be vindicated only by relentless experiment. And political expedience or no, I would hope there would always be a small contingent of holdouts against every theory, just to make sure we never find ourselves permanently entrenched in a pocket of false truths.
People game systems, whether it is government employees realizing they can minimize effort, companies realizing they can maximize payout, or politicians realizing they can appease their constituents. The problem with government is that it creates the system to be gamed and has too much inertia to self-correct in a reasonable way. Properly constructed market solutions are cost effective because the players themselves punish bad pricing and inefficiency. That can of course be gamed as well, but if government concentrates on punishing bad actors instead of on rigging or monopolizing the system, it seems you get the best result. But I think it's fair to blame 'government' for creating projects subject to abusive bids. If your system "would work," but only if "everyone behaves in the most honest self-denying way," it's unfortunately a stupid system.
There has only been one national poll so far that has shown a GOP candidate beating Hillary, but it was within the margin of error. If the democrats nominate Sanders, however, it will be a GOP bloodbath as he beats the GOP candidates by much more than the margin of error.
I think you are missing some important facts about how these elections work. Name recognition is a huge factor. Hillary Clinton has been in the national spotlight for decades, and in a rather major way.
The Republicans have been splitting the attention between what was initially 17 people (I don't know what it's whittled down to right now) and even then the media has been consistently providing Trump with more attention than all the others combined.
Once a frontrunner is chosen they will inherit quite a bit of media and voter attention as well as advertising for their national campaign. That part of Hillary's advantage will largely dissipate. Hillary also will be subject to greater scrutiny. People polled may not know anything about her as a candidate other than that they liked her husband. Once they have some information, their candidate preference may well change. (And I think probably will in many cases.)
Your polling predictions are all based on data which has little or nothing to do with the political context we'll have in November.
This is important because the other side of the coin is large groups of people who don't know anyone who is siding with Apple. Fyi to all of us, we really don't have much ground to gripe about the world having technically illiterate opinions if we never expose them to literate opinions. And that means making friends with people who know nothing about technology and entering their social circles. We can of course have discussions amongst ourselves on Slashdot, but unless your grandpa reads Slashdot, you haven't accomplished anything in the way of influencing the general public.
Both Democrats and Republicans do gerrymandering whenever they can get away with it, but the process works better for Republicans because they are less concentrated: Even the reddest of red districts (say a rural county in Utah) have only about 70% Republicans, but it is easy to find urban districts that are 95% Democrat.
What defines "gerrymandering"? A square grid of districts would have no human bias but by your observation would greatly favor Republicans. You have to think carefully about where the lines go if you want to make sure those high-density Democrat areas have influence spread across multiple districts. Doesn't that mean that gerrymandering works better for Democrats?
They are attempting to have some principles regarding where they get funding - if they can't demonstrate their ability to function without Exxon funding, it calls into question whether or not Exxon has influence over their publications.
Who has more liberty to pursue their own ideas, someone funded by a thousand different donors with independent rationales, or someone funded by one or two organizations? Or will they also show their intellectual independence by dropping all their other funding sources?
We've used ancient structures as quarries. Used mummies as medicine. Shakespearean manuscripts have been burned for fuel by the unwitting. Fossil fields ground up. As unlikely as it may seem, it actually wouldn't be terrible to give some occasional thought to whether there is anything useful being lost in the salt mines.
If you want to say it's shockingly bad, first establish what a proper percentage should be. It is apparently a similar result to other basic science questions in which Americans may out-perform other countries:
To the question "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth," 26 percent of those surveyed [Americans] answered incorrectly. . . . Only 66 percent of people in a 2005 European Union poll answered the basic astronomy question correctly. However, both China and the EU fared significantly better (66 percent and 70 percent, respectively) on the question about human evolution.
-- NPR
What result should we expect when surveying a large population of non-STEM individuals who, received their science education (if any) 40 years ago under different standards and haven't looked back since, may not ever have achieved high school diploma, may not have the reasoning skills to understand abstract scientific theories, or may just be joshing with the pollster? What result are we striving for? And, most importantly, how will achieving that result affect our scientific output?
I am open to the idea that this represents a significant problem, but I have a suspicion that it is really not as big of an issue as people who live-and-breath science like to perceive. Some hard data on the externalities would be nice.
Cycling is a bit special as a longer endurance sport. There's more to be gained from marginal benefits. That said, cheating is very wide spread. It's a constant race between athletes and analysts. You often can't detect a new strategy of cheating until someone is physically caught and then you can develop an analytical method to do so. Lance Armstrong was caught not by the technology of the time but by revisiting blood samples which had been stored. Athletes may content themselves with microdoping where they use very small doses of drugs or reserved blood to evade detection limits. It obviously is less effective, but they're looking for whatever edge they can get. With small alterations it becomes difficult to distinguish between artificial enhancement and genetic anomalies. If you don't hear about people cheating I think it has a lot to do with them getting very good at it.
Depends on whether you are talking about "free speech" as an American legal concept or "free speech" as a philosophic good.
Sure, the government is the biggest bully in town and it minimizes a lot of potential harm if it is required to play nice. But if all "freedom of speech" is to you is a promise to be harangued, fired, and/or murdered only by people unaffiliated with the government, then it's obvious that you don't appreciate freedom for freedom's sake.
In my opinion requiring companies and people to go out of their way to provide equal platforms, etc., would lead to worse abuses. So I don't think that there should be any requirement placed on person or companies to transmit or support your views. But I still say a society where people use their private power and influence to purposefully squelch the views of others is intrinsically unfree. Same as how, even with slavery outlawed, as a black you were not really enjoying equal rights and protections in the post-Civil War South. Not while the society itself was determined to deny those to you.
Over a broad enough time span that is true -- the right has wished to stifle communist and anti-religious speech, etc. They also, in relatively greater proportion, support blurring nudity and beeping out a handful of words broadcast on public channels.
But realistically censorship, particularly of ideas, is now a weapon sought and wielded by the cultural left. That may largely be a practical consideration -- they have predominant influence over media and public education and so are the ones who benefit most from claiming the right to stamp out minority views. However, it remains they are the ones most likely to tell you that you can't publish an editorial in the college paper because it is insensitive, that you should be fired from your job and stripped of your recognition because of something you said, that you be disinvited from speaking because your views are not in line with those they feel comfortable with.
The left should be conscious of this and attempt to fix it, for the general good, because some day the pendulum will swing the other way again, and to avoid pushing out their civil libertarians.
Law enforcement receives substantial additional vehicle training and have lights and sirens to make other drivers aware when they responding to an emergency or blocking an intersection. Law enforcement is allowed to carry restricted firearms and to do so in restricted areas (such as bars) while on duty, but again they have substantial additional training and are performing a specific function. The conditions for legally discharging their firearms are pretty much the same as for you or I.
The privileges of a licensed police officer are comparable to those of other licensed professionals. E.g., a surgeon or a commercial airline pilot can do things that most others (including cops) could not do legally, but because they are specially equipped to do so in a beneficent manner.
However, neither a surgeon, airline pilot, or police officer is entitled to use their special dispensations to do anything malignant. The issue here is that disseminating child pornography is understood to directly and/or indirectly harm children. The police should not have the option of using that or even of idly allowing that to occure in order to obtain their convictions, any more than it would be okay for them letting a murder go forward so they could bring up murder charges.
I think taking over the website is a valid sting. But they should not have provided the actual images once it was in their capacity to prevent them from being distributed. If that results in less evidence collected, so be it. Protecting the innocent is of higher priority than maximizing justice.
But the people who make the decisions about who is going to be killed already may never set foot on the battlefield. And veterans aren't to my knowledge the major component of war protesters.
On the other hand remote combat (theoretically) removes much of the incentive for killing. If you are out on the battlefield, killing is how you guarantee your personal survival. Armies have historically dealt with non-violent acts such as desertion with on-site execution of their own men because of their own personal stakes in victory. We even accept "I was afraid for my life" as a justification to kill back at home. But that argument doesn't work if you are safe in an office controlling a robot. With robots you can justify waiting to see if the person reaching for their pocket is going to pull out a gun or a detonator. You can justify non-lethal response even if it is.
Not saying we will automatically pursue that. But it's a possible future, given the technology.
Everything we have ever known has had a cause.
I disagree, we are ever in search of causes, precisely because our body of facts great exceeds our body of explanations. Some facts, such as quantum randomness, seem to explicitly exceed our ability to link a previous state to the final state except by statistical description.
Taking it for granted that we can uniquely relate all effects that we have observed with prior causes -- and even that we will never encounter a future exception -- on what basis can we assume this would apply when the universe was in a fundamentally different situation? In fact, we know some of our existing assumptions must break down, and it is one of the standing problems to understand how. But how can you assign a probability to rules like cause and effect under unknown conditions? Inside the scope of a basketball game, you can estimate the probability that a player, or a group of players, will score. What good is that estimate if I tell you their next game will be a newly invented sport with unknown rules?
But I think it's fine to assume things like an ultimate cause or chain of causes. It's not science, because it's not subject to observational inquiry. However, it may still be true. I just don't think it's something we can state as having to be true.
"Extreme" has different contexts but a political extreme almost certainly refers to views far removed from those generally held. According to your interpretation, someone who supports "some genocide" has adopted a moderate position and someone who is totally against genocide is an extremist. You can rationalize that usage if you have a specific purpose to do so but it's obviously not the common usage.
In the US, advocating significant gun restrictions is an extreme position. Globally, it is not. Select euthanasia is moderate position by polling (although not very popular as actual legal policy). The American's left's views on abortion are very extreme both globally and locally. The right fosters some extreme views as well but realistically the political discussion of abortion in the US is almost exclusively about the second and third trimester and it is the right which (collectively) seeks the more moderate policies.
Want to pursue a STEM or other high-paying degree? No problem, but you have to pay a lot more for your degree.
Isn't paying more for something that's worth more just normal market behavior? For that matter, engineering and science programs typically also cost the school more, but are somewhat subsidized by tuition from cheaper humanities programs.
That said, there is the issue that engineering degrees are also more valuable to society, which may want to provide its own incentives.
My idea: involve the employers in these ISAs. Plenty of employers already cover tuition in exchange for working a set number of years with them (including the U.S. government). Universities can act like unions, doing collective bargaining on behalf of the students (I am not assuming the universities' intrinsic benevolence here, but presumably students will choose to go to universities which can get them the best deals). Conversely, government and businesses might do a much better job of bargaining down tuition prices than loan subsidied college students have been doing. And instead of gambling on the future, students enter into the arrangement knowing exactly when they are going to be able to afford a mortgage. There are plenty of potential problems, but I think the present process of "guess a good major to land a job from an unspecified employer and make indefinite earnings and by the way your wager is $100k and 4-6 years of your life" leaves a lot to improve.
In the world in which doctors are constantly evaluating all humans for all conditions, I agree with you. But "the average slob" does not go to see the doctor unless he is dying, and when he is dying, his bladder/hairloss/libido issues may not come up.
"end users, ask your sysadmin if systemd is right for you."
"End users, there is this thing called VPN which lets you do your work offsite. Ask your sysadmin if you want privileges enabled on your account."
The amazing part is that most people don't consider it as a disease to be eradicated.
Clearly, plenty do. There's always some "disease to be eradicated." It could be a religion or other ideology, or an ethnicity. If you haven't had your turn yet to dig the mass graves I'm sure as time goes on the opportunity will arise. Then your ideological allies (if you're not around) can go about eradicating the disease and ushering in the new paradise. It's funny how eliminating these undesirable elements of humanity and thought never seems to produce the promised paradise, however. But I'm sure it will work for you.
If the police failed to act on information a rape or murder was planned because they wanted to catch the perpetrator in the act, there would be outcry. You don't jeopardize the safety of the innocent to assail the (potentially) guilty. Collecting foreign intelligence is not more important than heading off immediate threats to domestic citizens. Clearly the NSA views it as all about "catching the bad guy" and has forgotten the reason the bad guys are considered bad. It's like SWAT leaving a bomb in a public building because, "Hey, maybe we could trip it when the bad guys get back."
Don't store anything on the laptop. The fact they can legally compel you to provide the means of data access means you are in trouble in every case which they have possession of both you and your laptop. You can either do a really good job of hiding the data or you can keep it outside of where they can get it. How about a remote server a trusted person can deactivate if they hear about your situation?
But the time we set our clocks to has no bearing on levels of sunlight, that's just how we originally began measuring it. We can start our days at 8am as well as we can start them at 7am. Apparently we really like being able to have everyone in large (but not too large) geographic regions say they 'start work at 7' and that 'Spongebob will be on at 9.' Whatever reasons we have for that, are they reasons which are going to fall apart if things shift by 1 second every couple of years? I'm guessing not.
Probably, yes. The development of space exploration could be basically credited to the occurrence of the the second world war. Does that indicate the need for more world wars to advance human civilization?
Anecdotal evidence is inherently flawed here because, no matter what route we had taken, we could always point to whatever we did achieve and say "we wouldn't have that if we had done something else" and not be aware of anything we might have created instead. So it's a kind of evidence that can only support the status quo.
Personally, I think it's obvious that a global communications network was inevitable. The internet was not even the first thing which could be called that. There are various reasons it could actually have benefited us to develop the technology later and/or in a different way. What if we wound up with all data and communications encrypted by default, for example? The internet is great but its existence in its present form is not a proof that society needs to progress through projects undertaken by our department of defense.
The real question is how much *general progress* results from dollars invested in NSF grants etc. verses dollars invested in other ways. That's a difficult enough question that is probably a lot of fair points to be made either way. But by all means lets try to qualify what a dollar of public research spending gets us. We may decide we want to keep public research but still reform how it is set up.
You can always work cheaper than a robot. Whatever a robot costs, there's nothing stopping you from charging less (well, except minimum wage laws). How will you afford to eat? Because thanks to the fact food is now produced by robots and supercheap labor, it doesn't cost very much any more.
People will always be exchanging things. Money facilitates that. It won't ever become the barrier preventing it. What really drives people away from menial labor is having better job options to where trying to outbid robots is not appealing.
"Look, we've already put a trip to the Bahamas in our itinerary, the only thing we can reasonably do now is sign up for more credit cards."
The economists promise us there are complicated economic reasons why our present debt is good, or at least not bad, and I'm not saying they are wrong (I'm not educated enough to do so). But I don't think the domestic analogy is the way to go if you want to defend that position.
Newtonian mechanics is not going to explain how the cat is both dead and alive.