"There are no naked pre-cogs inside glowing jacuzzis yet, but the Florida State Department of Juvenile Justice will use analysis software to predict crime by young delinquents, putting potential offenders under specific prevention and education programs. Goodbye, human rights!"
Now, consider IBM's press release, which seems to be the only news available on this subject, and is certainly the unlinked source of Gizmodo's fit. Previously, Florida State officials were using Excel macros to sort convicted juvenile offenders into different programs, and now they will use IBM's software to do it. Whether Florida's juvenile prosecutions or unjust or not, whether their programs are effective or not, has no bearing on IBM's part in this.
IBM has sold Florida some statistical analysis software, which they will (apparently) use to stick heavy offenders into more punitive detention programs, saving the spaces in more rehabilitative programs for newer offenders. You may think that that policy is ill-advised as well--but it is perfectly legal. At least the sorting will be (hopefully) less capricious than it was before. IBM is certainly not enabling Florida to enforce "pre-crimes" or anything of the sort. This is not even affecting the judicial sentences. Everyone being analyzed here has already been found guilty by a court.
Prior to predictive analytics, the organization used Excel for basic analysis on projections for the number of delinquency cases they would take in, which had limited functionality. They selected IBM SPSS predictive analytics due to the ease of use and the advanced analytic capabilities.
The organization will now utilize the new predictive analytics system as a component in many of the performance measurement analyses conducted and distributed to agency staff throughout the year. These reports assess the future of delinquency cases to evaluate what juvenile crime trends may look like in the immediate future. This information will help the organization to better plan and project staffing and other resource needs.
IBM recently also announced that the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom uses predictive analytics to assess the likelihood of prisoners reoffending upon their release to help improve public safety. With predictive technology from IBM, the Ministry of Justice is analyzing hidden trends and patterns within the data. IBM SPSS predictive analytics has helped identify whether offenders with specific problems such as drug and alcohol misuse are more likely to reoffend than other prisoners.
It sounds like the Ministry of Justice might have something a bit more Orwellian (notice "public safety") in mind, but that will be a story for another day. Now take a deep breath, and control yourselves next time Kdawson posts a link to an inflammatory and ill-informed opinion piece. A worthier title for this event might have been "IBM enables Florida Juvenile Detention System to Become Slightly Less Cruel and Arbitrary."
Articles about obscure corporate figures, obscure companies, obscure Pokemon, etc. are exactly the kind of things that get deleted from Wikipedia on account of "relevance."
Take a look at some data on the seat belt laws: Maine has the highest fines and primary enforcement (like NY), and has the same seat belt usage rate as Ohio, which has secondary enforcement (only ticketed in conjunction with another primary offense). Most primary states (though by no means all) seem to have higher compliance rates, but this could very well be due to education. I wear a seat belt, not because it's the law, rather because it causes a very small discomfort in return for substantial savings in crash safety. In fact, if it weren't that I don't fancy bouncing around in a car like a pinball (from the back seat anyway), I wouldn't belt in just on the (arguably quixotic) principle of the thing (what I do in my own damn car, etc.).
As for cellphone use...well, I think that dialing a cellphone (or messing with radio/GPS) is best done while stopped or on the highway in light traffic, since it can easily cause me (and others I have watched) to drift out of the lane (or rear-end someone). Texting requires looking at your phone (not the road), so it is easy to see how that can be problematic. Talking on the phone, though, doesn't seems to be worse for my driving than yelling at senators (to myself) on the radio (CSPAN: XM 132!) or spacing out in a quiet car (though it may be the opposite in that case--I'm not convinced that my hindbrain doesn't drive better than my forebrain, though it can't follow new directions worth a damn). I know for a fact is is less deleterious than eating Taco Bell drive-through.
Perhaps I'm just benefiting from the low baseline inherent in my elite status as one of the ~10% below-average drivers. Cellphone laws make me leery of talking on the phone in front off cops, that's about it. Besides, the laws all further set me against them by making an arbitrary hands vs. hands-free distinction (though it is effectively impossible to prove without a subpoena that someone with an integral hands-free kit is chatting on the phone).
I would be very surprised if cellphone tickets made motorists stop talking, any more than speed limits make motorists stop speeding. The perceived "cost" of not speeding and/or talking on the phone is greater than the perceived cost of seat belt use. Whether it is right or not, most people see seat belt use as logical, while they see phone/speeding law as government imposition (and too inconvenient to obey). Others (i.e. sanctimonious assholes), of course, take perverse pride in punctiliously following all such laws and then bragging about it later in internet forums.
It is unclear to me how they can be "spending" $300k/state on this initiative when the states (or cities?) get $100/ticket. It sounds more like they are milking the Federal (state?) government for funds...because they can. I suppose it could be spun as the opportunity cost of not giving out $350 (NY) speeding tickets, assuming it isn't much easier to find a talker than a speeder (as it certainly is in an urban area).
For reasons totally unrelated to the (unsubstantiated) rumors that I am deeply bitter that no one has even heard of my self-evidently superior encyclopedia, Citizendium, I have discovered that it is my solemn duty under Federal law to attempt to have Wikipedia's servers seized by the FBI, thus inevitably thrusting the 121 properly expert-approved articles of Citizendium back into the spotlight where they bel--ah--I mean, thus saving...the children...from Jimbo.
"It was very difficult for the commissioners," says Ellinor Michel, the commission's executive secretary. "It was a question of celebrity, as everyone knows D. melanogaster."
That would certainly be awkward...if we lose Drosophila melanogaster, the only full binomial I will know from memory will be Homo sapiens. I'll have to memorize the name Caenorhabditis (of C. elegans fame) or something, and that will truly be a tragedy.
Firefox currently isolate [sic] only Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight, but will eventually isolate all plugins running on a page.
The quote emphasizes that Lorentz affects only plugins, not extensions, a distinction that seems to be escaping many posters.
I've had flash behave pretty screwily short of crashing, so this might be nicer if it included a mechanism to manually stop & restart plugins. Perhaps it will expose API allowing other add-ons to do so.
The plugin that gives me by far the most trouble (on Windows) is Adobe Acrobat Reader. I can already restart that (by killing the process) without crashing firefox.
I would provisionally agree with you that evolutionary theory is more mature than big bang theory (though I think it is pretty debatable), but surely you realize that evolutionary theory has an almost exactly analogous limitation regarding its initial conditions. That is, it explains how life has evolved and diversified, but not the particular manner in which life came to be.
It is generally believed that similar "selective" pressures acted on the molecules in the "primordial soup" (or something) to favor those which could remain coherent longer and/or reproduce better, but other than demonstrating that increasingly complex organic molecules can be synthesized inorganically, we have nothing but guesses at this point about the origin of life itself. It now seems you must stop believing in evolution, because we haven't explained the origin of life a whole lot better than we have the origin of the universe!
Do you know why evolution is a ridiculously strong theory? It is strong not so much in the sense that it explains everything, but in that it could explain everything, and there is no other theory that can come even close. Many details of the history of evolution still remain fairly mysterious to us (though the rapid progress of genetic technology has made a lot of inroads), arguably at least as mysterious as the macro-history of the universe. Even though there is still a lot of debate about the details of the big bang (a debate about which I am admittedly extremely ignorant myself), I don't think anyone questions that the universe is expanding, and that it was a great deal smaller. Rejecting that is just as ridiculous as rejecting Darwinian evolution.
"Big Bang" theory is not as widely accepted (certainly according to the poll) as evolutionary theory, but I would argue that this stems from ignorance alone. Much of the current literature in evolutionary biology (not biochemistry, though) is still comprehensible to the layman (or at least someone with a Bio 101 background). The same cannot be said of papers at the leading edge of astrophysics. In that sense, astrophysics is a more mature science, for all that it is younger. High school students will be tested on evolutionary theory if they take AP Bio, but the same cannot be said of astrophysics and AP Physics BC.
Finally, I find it absurd that you claim the origin of the universe is inherently inexplicable without resorting to "magic" without any evidence at all (and probably without any understanding of astrophysics), while in the same breath claiming that anyone who does not accept strong scientific theories is a moron. What is exactly is the rational basis for your beliefs about the beginning of the universe? The only thing you can say is that you do not know, or (if you had done your research, maybe) that "we" do not know. It may even be inexplicable...now.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. --Arthur C. Clarke
The slashdot headline insinuates that the NSF apparently has a creationist agenda, when the reality is that the NSF was hoping to prevent everyone else from finding out that America has a creationist agenda. Still sensational, though, I agree.
Incidentally, if you want to bash creationists, you might at least keep up with the cutting edge of creationist theory. The fossils are the skeletons left over from the animals that didn't make it on Noah's ark and subsequently drowned in the flood! Duh! Maybe you need to go educate yourself in the Creation Museum (or read about it in Vanity Fair).
I think the gist of Bruer's reply is that those sophisticated enough to pick apart the phrasing on the questionnaire would also be sophisticated enough to not want to fuck up the NSF's statistics on how many Americans accept evolution or the expansion of the universe, even if they believe that the NSF's understanding of the nuances of Big Bang or evolutionary theory leaves something to be desired.
Well...probably. Especially if there is any chance of tying responses to people's names (which there is if it is done by mail or phone).
Board members say the decision to drop the text was driven by a desire for scientific accuracy. The survey questions that NSF has used for 25 years to measure knowledge of evolution and the big bang were "flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because responses conflated knowledge and beliefs.
I agree with the parent that the primary, or at least one of the primary motivations that caused the board members to actually act on this was that the survey results were embarrassing. However, that does not mean that their objections aren't valid.
The board member who took the lead in removing the text was John Bruer, a philosopher who heads the St. Louis, Missouri-based James S. McDonnell Foundation. He told Science that his reservations about the two survey questions dated back to 2007, when he was the lead reviewer for the same chapter in the 2008 Indicators. He calls the survey questions "very blunt instruments not designed to capture public understanding" of the two topics.
It is unsurprising that this effort was spearheaded by a philosopher, attuned to the precision or lack thereof of language and its epistemological implications.
45% of Americans in 2008 answered true to the statement, "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals." The figure is similar to previous years and much lower than in Japan (78%), Europe (70%), China (69%), and South Korea (64%). The same gap exists for the response to a second statement, "The universe began with a big explosion," with which only 33% of Americans agreed.
The first thing I noticed about this was that the questions are indeed imprecise: it would have been more appropriate, if the questionnaire is indeed meant to test knowledge to say something like "The biological theory for the origin of man most supported by the evidence is that [earlier question]." Testing belief separately is not a bad idea, though: otherwise we really are trying to ignore reality.
The second thing that occurred to me was that South Korea did second-worst on the evolution question. Apparently, ~30% of South Koreans identify as Christian.
Christians aside, there could very well have been a small minority of perfectly scientific individuals who still answered "no" to either of the questions because of their poor phrasing. Perhaps they prefer to say that the universe "expanded rapidly." I am much more familiar with evolution than astrophysics, and wonder what is really meant by "developed from earlier species of animals." More than one species? Do they mean that transitively, or are they asking about a radical horizontal transfer theory? We could also argue about the precise meaning of "developed from" and "earlier." Of course, I would still answer "yes" because I don't want to troll the NSB survey, but maybe if I were having a bad day...
The questions are blunt instruments to capture the public understanding of the topics. I don't have a problem with rewriting them and hopefully expanding them into more questions. In the end, though, even Bruer agrees that pedants trolling the survey is not a (statistically) significant issue.
When asked if he expected those academics to answer "false" to the statement about humans having evolved from earlier species, Bruer said: "On that particular point, no."
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I agree in principle that all of this comments about the internet penetration were just sophistry...and I didn't actually include the funniest one:
So they will say, if you go to Korea or you go to France, you can get a faster Internet connection. Okay? That could be true in some companies -- in some countries. The facts are that, in the U.S., there is greater household penetration of access to the Internet than any country in Europe.
In Japan, where everybody looks at Japan as being so far ahead, they may have faster speeds, but we have higher utilization of people using the Internet. So our view is, whenever you look at these issues, you have to be very careful to look at what the market wants, not what government says is the most important issue.
Conclusion: the market wants slow internet! The market is a bit confused about data plans, but that seems...excessive. He actually segues into saying that what the market wants is their cellphone service, maintaining a semblance of credibility. Still, I think everyone should read the whole transcript. Seidenberg is a good speaker, and he comments somewhat candidly on Verizon policy and strategy (the obliquely, the rest of his industry). One must keep in mind his opening joke, however:
SEIDENBERG: You want me to hang myself on this one -- (laughter). You realize there are three people from the White House in the ceiling -- (laughter) -- listening to what I have to say.
The real morons here are you and those you modded you "Insightful". The quote is about offering new data pricing plans for cellphones, in the future. No one's contract has been, or is going to be, violated. You can against those policies if you want to, but simply tearing down ridiculous (but emotionally appealing) strawmen adds nothing to the rationality of the discussion.
I agree that buying internet service at some peak speed that is rarely if ever achieved is infuriating (though your comparison is hyperbolic). Unfortunately, the average internet consumer would rather be lied to, than actually buy a realistic package. That is, if, say, Verizon advertised that they are going to have tiered service, with varying guarantees at every level, and, say, Comcast says they have "Unlimited" service with the maximum bandwidth that Verizon offers, more people are going to go with Comcast, even if it is actually comparable to one of the lowest Verizon tiers in practice. The problem seems to be partly that people are complete morons about buying data service (including slashdotters, who want to have their cake and eat it too).
Of course, with their vast QoS abilities, it would entirely possible to offer realistic plans in addition to the "unlimited" ones. I am not sure why none of the major players have done so...but perhaps we will see movement in that direction (FiOS certainly seems to be more tiered than DSL generally was).
SEIDENBERG: Yes. Verizon has put more fiber in from Boston to Washington than all the Western European countries combined. All. We have -- if you look at smart phones -- not us, Apple, Google -- they have exploded this market in the U.S. Ask any European if they're not somewhat envious of the advancements of smart-phone technology in the U.S.
So it just seems to me this is just not even close.
It seems that he is saying that the U.S. has more "theoretical" fiber capacity than anyone else...whether that is actually being used...well, later in the interview he says that he fears that the implementation of many technologies may be too slow in the U.S., and explicitly says that Verizon's competitors are way behind on even capacity rollout. He also says this:
So they will say, if you go to Korea or you go to France, you can get a faster Internet connection. Okay? That could be true in some companies -- in some countries. The facts are that, in the U.S., there is greater household penetration of access to the Internet than any country in Europe.
In Japan, where everybody looks at Japan as being so far ahead, they may have faster speeds, but we have higher utilization of people using the Internet. So our view is, whenever you look at these issues, you have to be very careful to look at what the market wants, not what government says is the most important issue.
Let's take wireless, for example. Everybody says the European system was kind of better. Well, that's very interesting. If you look at minutes of use, the average American uses their cell phone four times as much -- four times as much -- as the average European. If you look at Europe, they publish penetration rates of 150 (percent), 160 (percent), 170 percent meaning that people have more than one phone, two phones, three phones.
He may have an argument with cellular service, but I would agree that those "we have more fiber!" arguments have the ring of equivocation. I have had a better experience with Verizon than say, Time Warner, though. The next time Roadrunner delivers on their bandwidth promises will be the first (though strangely it always seems to work just fine for the few weeks or so...). And certainly in cellphones their network appears to be a lot more robust (I've tried AT&T/Cingular and Sprint as well over the years). We'll see how the 4G turns out in a few years.
It seems true that every time someone mentions tiered pricing it turns into some sort of PR disaster, as Seidenberg alludes to elsewhere, but without tiered pricing either (1) the great majority of users will have to pay too much or (2) people will pay something like the median, but service won't be guaranteed. If everyone in the country of Sweden has 100 mbps synchronous & guaranteed, well, I guess most people are paying way too much for it there (independent of what the relative levels of "too much" might be between Sweden & the U.S.). My point is just that broadband is a hell of a lot more like electricity (for which you pay / kwH, with allowances for current demand) than, say, traditional cable, which you either have, or you don't, and pricing it differently is unnatural and inefficient, an artifact of (irrational) consumer expectations.
If you read the whole transcript, you'll see that he was talking about tiered pricing for their phone business only.
This is -- thank you for the question. Thank you for your comment. This goes to my investors so they don't think we're crazy.
So when you look at this question -- so let's look at the dichotomy between a carrier and the Silicon Valley types.
So most people think a carrier wants to charge for every minute on a linear basis in perpetuity, infinity. That's what you guys think, right? You're right, when we do that.
We don't really want to do that. What we want to do is give you a chance to buy a bundle, a session of 10 megabits or a session of 30.
The problem we have is 5 (percent) or 10 percent of the people are the abusers that are chewing up all the bandwidth. That's what happened with music and all that kind of thing.
So what we will do is put in reasonable data plans, and we've done this. We've just introduced a $30 data plan that does with every one of our BlackBerrys or smart phones, a 10 (dollar) or a $30 data plan that covers the majority of people who feel that's a fair price. I get to use it for 30, 40 hours and I pay a certain rate.
But when we now go after the very, very high users, the ones who camp on the network all day long every day doing things that -- who knows what they're doing -- those are the --
So, in effect it seems like he was actually saying that they prefer to avoid maximally efficient pricing (i.e. per minute/megabit charges) and instead sell you more than you will actually use (bundles), but the peak capacity is so much higher than the median that they feel they will need at least two tiers to pull that off (or else the price will obviously seem like a bad deal to everyone but a peak user). I would be all for per megabit pricing if it was the primary model. Right now with phones that kind of pricing is generally the surprise overage charge that people don't really consider when signing the contracts, so it is nowhere near competitive.
Forget the methodology in the study...the only conclusion I am drawing is that North Americans are luckier: they have no danger of acquiring additional calories from the seaweed which sushi rolls are wrapped in. "Indigestible" is a good thing for those of us living in the first world.
Indeed, we must stop this bacterium from crossing to our shores at any cost! Seaweed calories! Nooooooooooooooooooo!
I think that your defense of the pilots' actions is fairly reasonable from a military perspective. And indeed, firing on that group of men also seems reasonable, from a military perspective, given that the Bradley patrol was a block away and ostensibly threatened.
But don't you think that you jumped to the defense "it's a war, in a war zone," a bit quickly? The "war" ended a long time ago, and now we are conducting an occupation. Only, we are not quite even conducting an occupation. We are theoretically assisting the Iraqi security forces, apparently in the application of martial law--a very harsh martial law, in which (Coalition) force protection is given paramount priority. Is effectively turning Bagdhad into a warzone for an indeterminate period really going to bring us "victory", or indeed accomplish anything but keep the fires of resentment and resistance aflame for as long as occupation continues? The "problem" could be that the military units are continually put into a position where they must make hard choices like this to ensure their own safety.
For another example of this, consider General McChrystal's remarks (originally reported in part by the NYT) about how basically everyone shot at checkpoints in Afghanistan turns out to be a civilian. It is all done in the name of force protection, but do you think that is going to make the Afghan civilian population any less resentful? Do you think that they will just understand that the soldiers had to kill their family members because they couldn't be sure they weren't suicide bombers? The irrationality and excitability of the American public on the subject of terrorism is axiomatic; in Afghanistan much of the public doesn't even have the benefit of a high school education.
After two presidents and a number of changes in policy, we still haven't found the magic formula that will make the natives welcome our "peacekeeping efforts," so there is ample reason to be cynical about the future efficacy of our occupations. A "surge" in Afghanistan will inevitably result in even more civilian casualties, whatever its effect on the forces of the "Taliban," so I think I can be justified in wondering if our continuing Iraq/Afghanistan policy is based on nothing more than a massive Concorde fallacy.
The pilot indeed says on the radio that they have come to pick up the bodies (before they have even stopped!) and then "probably" to pick up the bodies and the weapons, after which they get permission to fire. They could clearly see before they opened fire, however, that the men picked up only the wounded man, and didn't touch any of the weapons. The ground forces who authorized the attack were not informed about that, and I wonder if they would still have done so if they were. If you read the declassified report clearing the pilots, it is not clear that any investigating or questioning of the Apache crews' version of events went on at all. The ground forces report is much more complete, but its objective is only to establish whether the military should pay compensation to the children or their families, not to judge the pilots.
Its comment on the van is: "...it is obvious from the radio transmissions on the gun camera tapes that the Apache pilots thought the van was to be used as a means of escape for the wounded insurgents...it is unknown what, if any, connection the van had to the insurgent activity." The report writer merely states that the pilots couldn't have known that there were children in the van, and that the crews likely thought the van was part of the same group (and from the video, I agree), not that they were actually correct to fire on it.
Regardless of whether the RoE was ever violated, the initial order to fire was given based not on the knowledge that the "insurgents" had an RPG, but on the basis that they were nonchalantly strolling around the corner of a building at the other end of the block from the convoy, and some of them appeared to have AK-47s. The action of the photographer, leaning around the building to take a photo, was certainly provocative, but when he took it the order to fire had already been given. And certainly the later incident which is partially included on the same video (the hellfire strike) implies that being armed and on the streets in the general vicinity of a patrol which hears small arms fire is always a death sentence. While this policy is no doubt effective from a force protection standpoint, it seems rather inevitable that it will engender massive resentment in the populace against both coalition forces, and even the current Iraqi government (which was jointly patrolling in the area). In other words, it is hard to believe that it will ever make the country "stable" enough for us to declare "victory."
Even if we declare victory anyway in Iraq, we have the same policies in Afghanistan, except with the added bonus of regular bombings with massive collateral damage. Karzai thinks that expressing anti-U.S. sentiment is a popular position. It is hard to believe that, whatever our objective, going on patrols to provoke insurgent activity and then blowing away everyone who looks threatening is going to bring us any closer to achieving it (unless our objective is indeed to occupy Iraq and/or Afghanistan indefinitely).
"Google does not make available any of the visual material that might be in the books, unless the copyright holder has agreed to it," said Pamela Samuelson, a digital copyright expert at University of California at Berkeley. "I don't really think this lawsuit has as good a chance as the authors' lawsuit."
The original publisher of the book most likely obtained permission to use the visual material only in the actual printed book, so this all makes sense. If Google is, however, (as Samuelson claims) not displaying that material, then why are these people even bothering to sue? Is it really true that they are not displaying the visual material?
I searched my bookshelf for a book full of pictures that I could use to test this theory, and I found the likely candidate in "A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars" by Brig. Gen. Vincent J. Esposito and Col. John R. Elting. This is a book that is has massive ~11.5" x 9.5" images on half of its pages. Unfortunately it has no preview available (it is, after all, long out of print and had a tiny run to begin with). Too bad.
A preview was available, however, for "The Napoleonic Wars: the Peninsular War 1807-1814" by Gregory Fremont-Barnes, which is also chock full of pictures of various types. According to the copyright page: cartography, by The Map Studio; picture research by Image Select International; origination by Grasmere Digital Imaging, Leeds, UK. In addition to that, every individual image has an attribution such as (for a fantastical looking artillery painting on page 39) the "Ann Ronan Picture Library." Now, do you really believe that Google actually went out and got a new permission from a different copyright holder for nearly every page of this book, or that they at most got it from the publisher, which may or may not be able to grant general permission to Google. Since Prof. Samuelson does not work for Google, I don't see how she can assert quite that confidently that Google indeed has permission in every instance. Even if the publishers all gave general permission, they might have been wrong to do so themselves, which still leaves Google on the hook (on some hook, anyway).
These photograph owners may well have a case; the result could be that we will either see another settlement similar to the book/author settlement (with more royalties), or Google will just cut out everything they couldn't successfully OCR, on the assumption that it is an image of unknown providence. This is certainly an awkward situation, and I would like to second Palestrina's earlier recommendation that everyone read what Lessig had to say about the obstacles presented by this sort of compilation work.
I agree, and I think one might further observe that the DA confidently admits only two "roles" in sexual behavior: "victim" and "offender." He is obviously a true believe in draconian "zero-tolerance" age of consent laws, and is probably looking for a good "sexting" case to litigate as we speak...that is, he believes that any and all "sexualized" behavior which a person under 18 may engage in is part of a crime.
Some daring media person could probably get some great quotes by asking him how he feels this relates or contributes to the "epidemic of onanism among school-age children."
Stross's argument is an absolutely ridiculous rationalization, though. DRM is too expensive because of server processor time? Please. A fairly long novel can be about a megabye: the server will send as much data in https traffic while someone checks out.
Now, I have bought about a dozen ebooks, in fact all from Baen for $5-$6, each multi-format and with no DRM, because it was convenient to have a collection of novels always with me on my phone. I had no desire to shell out cash for some ephemeral "book" which I could only ever use on one device, or class of devices, and which I could not even be said to "own" in any meaningful sense. Instead, I insist on having a physical copy of all my books (recalling the recent poll, I'm up to about 75'), and only see ebooks as a supplement. I fear that the market does not agree with me on this, but the market does seem to agree that not actually receiving a physical possession lowers the value of the purchase, to say nothing of the DRM.
Some publishers hope to ignore this reality (which Amazon anticipated with their $10 price cap) and sell ebooks at the exact same prices as they would the hardcover or the paperback: they see it as a simple matter of price discrimination, and expect that you are paying for the freshness of the intellectual property, not its binding. If this were truly the case, why even bother releasing the new, more expensive books in the superior "hardcover" binding? Consumers would be perfectly happy to shell out $20 for the paperback (trade paperbacks these days do seem to command hardcover prices...which has sometimes prompted me to buy 1st ed. hardcovers "used" instead...) if that theory were true; in general they are not.
Thus, I suspect that though the publishers (except for Baen, which has, incidentally, managed to find a way to legitimately justify the $15 price discrimination "premium" ebook markup--eARCs! Brilliant!) seem to be winning this skirmish, the ebook war is far from over. If they intend to turn ebooks into a substantial part of their future revenues, demanding that customers purchase $15 novels that will disappear along with their Kindles is not going to be a long-term successful business strategy. Whether it stems from simple emotional reactions or not (purchase decisions generally seem to be extremely emotional, though the case for an objectively reduced value here seems pretty sound), the average consumer is not yet anywhere near the point where he will value a kindle ebook equally with a hardcover. As ebooks catch on, DRM or not, they will undoubtedly change traditional publishing models: the size of printing runs and finicky chain-bookstore buyers will no longer be relevant to publisher economics, as increased authorial royalty percentages in ebook contracts are already reflecting.
Stross' argument that the increased cost of DRM swamp out its values in reduced piracy might well be correct; his specific claim that this is because of actual marginal costs of DRM are laughable. The "cost" of DRM is in perceived customer value, and Baen and Amazon's ebook experiments will provide evidence one way or the other. Like too many science fiction authors (particularly, cough, ones in technologically avant-garde Baen's stable), he apparently believes that the fact that he is writing in a speculative genre excuses him from doing solid research. I could write a few (hundred) pages on that lamentable subject, but perhaps this comment is long enough already...
The ACLU is a member too; I cannot believe that they would support something inimical to liberty. As for the suspicious number, it is clear that the website is just using unique and ostensibly random GUID-style static links for all of their pages to avoid the bother of naming them.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, consider IBM's press release, which seems to be the only news available on this subject, and is certainly the unlinked source of Gizmodo's fit. Previously, Florida State officials were using Excel macros to sort convicted juvenile offenders into different programs, and now they will use IBM's software to do it. Whether Florida's juvenile prosecutions or unjust or not, whether their programs are effective or not, has no bearing on IBM's part in this.
IBM has sold Florida some statistical analysis software, which they will (apparently) use to stick heavy offenders into more punitive detention programs, saving the spaces in more rehabilitative programs for newer offenders. You may think that that policy is ill-advised as well--but it is perfectly legal. At least the sorting will be (hopefully) less capricious than it was before. IBM is certainly not enabling Florida to enforce "pre-crimes" or anything of the sort. This is not even affecting the judicial sentences. Everyone being analyzed here has already been found guilty by a court.
Prior to predictive analytics, the organization used Excel for basic analysis on projections for the number of delinquency cases they would take in, which had limited functionality. They selected IBM SPSS predictive analytics due to the ease of use and the advanced analytic capabilities.
The organization will now utilize the new predictive analytics system as a component in many of the performance measurement analyses conducted and distributed to agency staff throughout the year. These reports assess the future of delinquency cases to evaluate what juvenile crime trends may look like in the immediate future. This information will help the organization to better plan and project staffing and other resource needs.
IBM recently also announced that the Ministry of Justice in the United Kingdom uses predictive analytics to assess the likelihood of prisoners reoffending upon their release to help improve public safety. With predictive technology from IBM, the Ministry of Justice is analyzing hidden trends and patterns within the data. IBM SPSS predictive analytics has helped identify whether offenders with specific problems such as drug and alcohol misuse are more likely to reoffend than other prisoners.
It sounds like the Ministry of Justice might have something a bit more Orwellian (notice "public safety") in mind, but that will be a story for another day. Now take a deep breath, and control yourselves next time Kdawson posts a link to an inflammatory and ill-informed opinion piece. A worthier title for this event might have been "IBM enables Florida Juvenile Detention System to Become Slightly Less Cruel and Arbitrary."
That is, on account of "notability."
Articles about obscure corporate figures, obscure companies, obscure Pokemon, etc. are exactly the kind of things that get deleted from Wikipedia on account of "relevance."
Take a look at some data on the seat belt laws: Maine has the highest fines and primary enforcement (like NY), and has the same seat belt usage rate as Ohio, which has secondary enforcement (only ticketed in conjunction with another primary offense). Most primary states (though by no means all) seem to have higher compliance rates, but this could very well be due to education. I wear a seat belt, not because it's the law, rather because it causes a very small discomfort in return for substantial savings in crash safety. In fact, if it weren't that I don't fancy bouncing around in a car like a pinball (from the back seat anyway), I wouldn't belt in just on the (arguably quixotic) principle of the thing (what I do in my own damn car, etc.).
As for cellphone use...well, I think that dialing a cellphone (or messing with radio/GPS) is best done while stopped or on the highway in light traffic, since it can easily cause me (and others I have watched) to drift out of the lane (or rear-end someone). Texting requires looking at your phone (not the road), so it is easy to see how that can be problematic. Talking on the phone, though, doesn't seems to be worse for my driving than yelling at senators (to myself) on the radio (CSPAN: XM 132!) or spacing out in a quiet car (though it may be the opposite in that case--I'm not convinced that my hindbrain doesn't drive better than my forebrain, though it can't follow new directions worth a damn). I know for a fact is is less deleterious than eating Taco Bell drive-through.
Perhaps I'm just benefiting from the low baseline inherent in my elite status as one of the ~10% below-average drivers. Cellphone laws make me leery of talking on the phone in front off cops, that's about it. Besides, the laws all further set me against them by making an arbitrary hands vs. hands-free distinction (though it is effectively impossible to prove without a subpoena that someone with an integral hands-free kit is chatting on the phone).
I would be very surprised if cellphone tickets made motorists stop talking, any more than speed limits make motorists stop speeding. The perceived "cost" of not speeding and/or talking on the phone is greater than the perceived cost of seat belt use. Whether it is right or not, most people see seat belt use as logical, while they see phone/speeding law as government imposition (and too inconvenient to obey). Others (i.e. sanctimonious assholes), of course, take perverse pride in punctiliously following all such laws and then bragging about it later in internet forums.
It is unclear to me how they can be "spending" $300k/state on this initiative when the states (or cities?) get $100/ticket. It sounds more like they are milking the Federal (state?) government for funds...because they can. I suppose it could be spun as the opportunity cost of not giving out $350 (NY) speeding tickets, assuming it isn't much easier to find a talker than a speeder (as it certainly is in an urban area).
For reasons totally unrelated to the (unsubstantiated) rumors that I am deeply bitter that no one has even heard of my self-evidently superior encyclopedia, Citizendium, I have discovered that it is my solemn duty under Federal law to attempt to have Wikipedia's servers seized by the FBI, thus inevitably thrusting the 121 properly expert-approved articles of Citizendium back into the spotlight where they bel--ah--I mean, thus saving...the children...from Jimbo.
"It was very difficult for the commissioners," says Ellinor Michel, the commission's executive secretary. "It was a question of celebrity, as everyone knows D. melanogaster."
That would certainly be awkward...if we lose Drosophila melanogaster, the only full binomial I will know from memory will be Homo sapiens. I'll have to memorize the name Caenorhabditis (of C. elegans fame) or something, and that will truly be a tragedy.
My earlier reading of the comments was unfair, the vast majority of posters seem quite clear on what a plugin is. Yay, slashdot!
Firefox currently isolate [sic] only Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight, but will eventually isolate all plugins running on a page.
The quote emphasizes that Lorentz affects only plugins, not extensions, a distinction that seems to be escaping many posters.
I've had flash behave pretty screwily short of crashing, so this might be nicer if it included a mechanism to manually stop & restart plugins. Perhaps it will expose API allowing other add-ons to do so.
The plugin that gives me by far the most trouble (on Windows) is Adobe Acrobat Reader. I can already restart that (by killing the process) without crashing firefox.
It is generally believed that similar "selective" pressures acted on the molecules in the "primordial soup" (or something) to favor those which could remain coherent longer and/or reproduce better, but other than demonstrating that increasingly complex organic molecules can be synthesized inorganically, we have nothing but guesses at this point about the origin of life itself. It now seems you must stop believing in evolution, because we haven't explained the origin of life a whole lot better than we have the origin of the universe!
Do you know why evolution is a ridiculously strong theory? It is strong not so much in the sense that it explains everything, but in that it could explain everything, and there is no other theory that can come even close. Many details of the history of evolution still remain fairly mysterious to us (though the rapid progress of genetic technology has made a lot of inroads), arguably at least as mysterious as the macro-history of the universe. Even though there is still a lot of debate about the details of the big bang (a debate about which I am admittedly extremely ignorant myself), I don't think anyone questions that the universe is expanding, and that it was a great deal smaller. Rejecting that is just as ridiculous as rejecting Darwinian evolution.
"Big Bang" theory is not as widely accepted (certainly according to the poll) as evolutionary theory, but I would argue that this stems from ignorance alone. Much of the current literature in evolutionary biology (not biochemistry, though) is still comprehensible to the layman (or at least someone with a Bio 101 background). The same cannot be said of papers at the leading edge of astrophysics. In that sense, astrophysics is a more mature science, for all that it is younger. High school students will be tested on evolutionary theory if they take AP Bio, but the same cannot be said of astrophysics and AP Physics BC.
Finally, I find it absurd that you claim the origin of the universe is inherently inexplicable without resorting to "magic" without any evidence at all (and probably without any understanding of astrophysics), while in the same breath claiming that anyone who does not accept strong scientific theories is a moron. What is exactly is the rational basis for your beliefs about the beginning of the universe? The only thing you can say is that you do not know, or (if you had done your research, maybe) that "we" do not know. It may even be inexplicable...now.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. --Arthur C. Clarke
The slashdot headline insinuates that the NSF apparently has a creationist agenda, when the reality is that the NSF was hoping to prevent everyone else from finding out that America has a creationist agenda. Still sensational, though, I agree.
Incidentally, if you want to bash creationists, you might at least keep up with the cutting edge of creationist theory. The fossils are the skeletons left over from the animals that didn't make it on Noah's ark and subsequently drowned in the flood! Duh! Maybe you need to go educate yourself in the Creation Museum (or read about it in Vanity Fair).
I think the gist of Bruer's reply is that those sophisticated enough to pick apart the phrasing on the questionnaire would also be sophisticated enough to not want to fuck up the NSF's statistics on how many Americans accept evolution or the expansion of the universe, even if they believe that the NSF's understanding of the nuances of Big Bang or evolutionary theory leaves something to be desired.
Well...probably. Especially if there is any chance of tying responses to people's names (which there is if it is done by mail or phone).
I agree with the parent that the primary, or at least one of the primary motivations that caused the board members to actually act on this was that the survey results were embarrassing. However, that does not mean that their objections aren't valid.
It is unsurprising that this effort was spearheaded by a philosopher, attuned to the precision or lack thereof of language and its epistemological implications.
The first thing I noticed about this was that the questions are indeed imprecise: it would have been more appropriate, if the questionnaire is indeed meant to test knowledge to say something like "The biological theory for the origin of man most supported by the evidence is that [earlier question]." Testing belief separately is not a bad idea, though: otherwise we really are trying to ignore reality.
The second thing that occurred to me was that South Korea did second-worst on the evolution question. Apparently, ~30% of South Koreans identify as Christian.
Christians aside, there could very well have been a small minority of perfectly scientific individuals who still answered "no" to either of the questions because of their poor phrasing. Perhaps they prefer to say that the universe "expanded rapidly." I am much more familiar with evolution than astrophysics, and wonder what is really meant by "developed from earlier species of animals." More than one species? Do they mean that transitively, or are they asking about a radical horizontal transfer theory? We could also argue about the precise meaning of "developed from" and "earlier." Of course, I would still answer "yes" because I don't want to troll the NSB survey, but maybe if I were having a bad day...
The questions are blunt instruments to capture the public understanding of the topics. I don't have a problem with rewriting them and hopefully expanding them into more questions. In the end, though, even Bruer agrees that pedants trolling the survey is not a (statistically) significant issue.
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Conclusion: the market wants slow internet! The market is a bit confused about data plans, but that seems...excessive. He actually segues into saying that what the market wants is their cellphone service, maintaining a semblance of credibility. Still, I think everyone should read the whole transcript. Seidenberg is a good speaker, and he comments somewhat candidly on Verizon policy and strategy (the obliquely, the rest of his industry). One must keep in mind his opening joke, however:
The real morons here are you and those you modded you "Insightful". The quote is about offering new data pricing plans for cellphones, in the future . No one's contract has been, or is going to be, violated. You can against those policies if you want to, but simply tearing down ridiculous (but emotionally appealing) strawmen adds nothing to the rationality of the discussion.
I agree that buying internet service at some peak speed that is rarely if ever achieved is infuriating (though your comparison is hyperbolic). Unfortunately, the average internet consumer would rather be lied to, than actually buy a realistic package. That is, if, say, Verizon advertised that they are going to have tiered service, with varying guarantees at every level, and, say, Comcast says they have "Unlimited" service with the maximum bandwidth that Verizon offers, more people are going to go with Comcast, even if it is actually comparable to one of the lowest Verizon tiers in practice. The problem seems to be partly that people are complete morons about buying data service (including slashdotters, who want to have their cake and eat it too).
Of course, with their vast QoS abilities, it would entirely possible to offer realistic plans in addition to the "unlimited" ones. I am not sure why none of the major players have done so...but perhaps we will see movement in that direction (FiOS certainly seems to be more tiered than DSL generally was).
It seems that he is saying that the U.S. has more "theoretical" fiber capacity than anyone else...whether that is actually being used...well, later in the interview he says that he fears that the implementation of many technologies may be too slow in the U.S., and explicitly says that Verizon's competitors are way behind on even capacity rollout. He also says this:
He may have an argument with cellular service, but I would agree that those "we have more fiber!" arguments have the ring of equivocation. I have had a better experience with Verizon than say, Time Warner, though. The next time Roadrunner delivers on their bandwidth promises will be the first (though strangely it always seems to work just fine for the few weeks or so...). And certainly in cellphones their network appears to be a lot more robust (I've tried AT&T/Cingular and Sprint as well over the years). We'll see how the 4G turns out in a few years.
It seems true that every time someone mentions tiered pricing it turns into some sort of PR disaster, as Seidenberg alludes to elsewhere, but without tiered pricing either (1) the great majority of users will have to pay too much or (2) people will pay something like the median, but service won't be guaranteed. If everyone in the country of Sweden has 100 mbps synchronous & guaranteed, well, I guess most people are paying way too much for it there (independent of what the relative levels of "too much" might be between Sweden & the U.S.). My point is just that broadband is a hell of a lot more like electricity (for which you pay / kwH, with allowances for current demand) than, say, traditional cable, which you either have, or you don't, and pricing it differently is unnatural and inefficient, an artifact of (irrational) consumer expectations.
So, in effect it seems like he was actually saying that they prefer to avoid maximally efficient pricing (i.e. per minute/megabit charges) and instead sell you more than you will actually use (bundles), but the peak capacity is so much higher than the median that they feel they will need at least two tiers to pull that off (or else the price will obviously seem like a bad deal to everyone but a peak user). I would be all for per megabit pricing if it was the primary model. Right now with phones that kind of pricing is generally the surprise overage charge that people don't really consider when signing the contracts, so it is nowhere near competitive.
Forget the methodology in the study...the only conclusion I am drawing is that North Americans are luckier: they have no danger of acquiring additional calories from the seaweed which sushi rolls are wrapped in. "Indigestible" is a good thing for those of us living in the first world.
Indeed, we must stop this bacterium from crossing to our shores at any cost! Seaweed calories! Nooooooooooooooooooo!
I think that your defense of the pilots' actions is fairly reasonable from a military perspective. And indeed, firing on that group of men also seems reasonable, from a military perspective, given that the Bradley patrol was a block away and ostensibly threatened.
But don't you think that you jumped to the defense "it's a war, in a war zone," a bit quickly? The "war" ended a long time ago, and now we are conducting an occupation. Only, we are not quite even conducting an occupation. We are theoretically assisting the Iraqi security forces, apparently in the application of martial law--a very harsh martial law, in which (Coalition) force protection is given paramount priority. Is effectively turning Bagdhad into a warzone for an indeterminate period really going to bring us "victory", or indeed accomplish anything but keep the fires of resentment and resistance aflame for as long as occupation continues? The "problem" could be that the military units are continually put into a position where they must make hard choices like this to ensure their own safety.
For another example of this, consider General McChrystal's remarks (originally reported in part by the NYT) about how basically everyone shot at checkpoints in Afghanistan turns out to be a civilian. It is all done in the name of force protection, but do you think that is going to make the Afghan civilian population any less resentful? Do you think that they will just understand that the soldiers had to kill their family members because they couldn't be sure they weren't suicide bombers? The irrationality and excitability of the American public on the subject of terrorism is axiomatic; in Afghanistan much of the public doesn't even have the benefit of a high school education.
After two presidents and a number of changes in policy, we still haven't found the magic formula that will make the natives welcome our "peacekeeping efforts," so there is ample reason to be cynical about the future efficacy of our occupations. A "surge" in Afghanistan will inevitably result in even more civilian casualties, whatever its effect on the forces of the "Taliban," so I think I can be justified in wondering if our continuing Iraq/Afghanistan policy is based on nothing more than a massive Concorde fallacy.
The pilot indeed says on the radio that they have come to pick up the bodies (before they have even stopped!) and then "probably" to pick up the bodies and the weapons, after which they get permission to fire. They could clearly see before they opened fire, however, that the men picked up only the wounded man, and didn't touch any of the weapons. The ground forces who authorized the attack were not informed about that, and I wonder if they would still have done so if they were. If you read the declassified report clearing the pilots, it is not clear that any investigating or questioning of the Apache crews' version of events went on at all. The ground forces report is much more complete, but its objective is only to establish whether the military should pay compensation to the children or their families, not to judge the pilots.
Its comment on the van is: "...it is obvious from the radio transmissions on the gun camera tapes that the Apache pilots thought the van was to be used as a means of escape for the wounded insurgents...it is unknown what, if any, connection the van had to the insurgent activity." The report writer merely states that the pilots couldn't have known that there were children in the van, and that the crews likely thought the van was part of the same group (and from the video, I agree), not that they were actually correct to fire on it.
Regardless of whether the RoE was ever violated, the initial order to fire was given based not on the knowledge that the "insurgents" had an RPG, but on the basis that they were nonchalantly strolling around the corner of a building at the other end of the block from the convoy, and some of them appeared to have AK-47s. The action of the photographer, leaning around the building to take a photo, was certainly provocative, but when he took it the order to fire had already been given. And certainly the later incident which is partially included on the same video (the hellfire strike) implies that being armed and on the streets in the general vicinity of a patrol which hears small arms fire is always a death sentence. While this policy is no doubt effective from a force protection standpoint, it seems rather inevitable that it will engender massive resentment in the populace against both coalition forces, and even the current Iraqi government (which was jointly patrolling in the area). In other words, it is hard to believe that it will ever make the country "stable" enough for us to declare "victory."
Even if we declare victory anyway in Iraq, we have the same policies in Afghanistan, except with the added bonus of regular bombings with massive collateral damage. Karzai thinks that expressing anti-U.S. sentiment is a popular position. It is hard to believe that, whatever our objective, going on patrols to provoke insurgent activity and then blowing away everyone who looks threatening is going to bring us any closer to achieving it (unless our objective is indeed to occupy Iraq and/or Afghanistan indefinitely).
The original publisher of the book most likely obtained permission to use the visual material only in the actual printed book, so this all makes sense. If Google is, however, (as Samuelson claims) not displaying that material, then why are these people even bothering to sue? Is it really true that they are not displaying the visual material?
I searched my bookshelf for a book full of pictures that I could use to test this theory, and I found the likely candidate in "A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars" by Brig. Gen. Vincent J. Esposito and Col. John R. Elting. This is a book that is has massive ~11.5" x 9.5" images on half of its pages. Unfortunately it has no preview available (it is, after all, long out of print and had a tiny run to begin with). Too bad.
A preview was available, however, for "The Napoleonic Wars: the Peninsular War 1807-1814" by Gregory Fremont-Barnes, which is also chock full of pictures of various types. According to the copyright page: cartography, by The Map Studio; picture research by Image Select International; origination by Grasmere Digital Imaging, Leeds, UK. In addition to that, every individual image has an attribution such as (for a fantastical looking artillery painting on page 39) the "Ann Ronan Picture Library." Now, do you really believe that Google actually went out and got a new permission from a different copyright holder for nearly every page of this book, or that they at most got it from the publisher, which may or may not be able to grant general permission to Google. Since Prof. Samuelson does not work for Google, I don't see how she can assert quite that confidently that Google indeed has permission in every instance. Even if the publishers all gave general permission, they might have been wrong to do so themselves, which still leaves Google on the hook (on some hook, anyway).
These photograph owners may well have a case; the result could be that we will either see another settlement similar to the book/author settlement (with more royalties), or Google will just cut out everything they couldn't successfully OCR, on the assumption that it is an image of unknown providence. This is certainly an awkward situation, and I would like to second Palestrina's earlier recommendation that everyone read what Lessig had to say about the obstacles presented by this sort of compilation work.
I agree, and I think one might further observe that the DA confidently admits only two "roles" in sexual behavior: "victim" and "offender." He is obviously a true believe in draconian "zero-tolerance" age of consent laws, and is probably looking for a good "sexting" case to litigate as we speak...that is, he believes that any and all "sexualized" behavior which a person under 18 may engage in is part of a crime.
Some daring media person could probably get some great quotes by asking him how he feels this relates or contributes to the "epidemic of onanism among school-age children."
Stross's argument is an absolutely ridiculous rationalization, though. DRM is too expensive because of server processor time? Please. A fairly long novel can be about a megabye: the server will send as much data in https traffic while someone checks out.
Now, I have bought about a dozen ebooks, in fact all from Baen for $5-$6, each multi-format and with no DRM, because it was convenient to have a collection of novels always with me on my phone. I had no desire to shell out cash for some ephemeral "book" which I could only ever use on one device, or class of devices, and which I could not even be said to "own" in any meaningful sense. Instead, I insist on having a physical copy of all my books (recalling the recent poll, I'm up to about 75'), and only see ebooks as a supplement. I fear that the market does not agree with me on this, but the market does seem to agree that not actually receiving a physical possession lowers the value of the purchase, to say nothing of the DRM.
Some publishers hope to ignore this reality (which Amazon anticipated with their $10 price cap) and sell ebooks at the exact same prices as they would the hardcover or the paperback: they see it as a simple matter of price discrimination, and expect that you are paying for the freshness of the intellectual property, not its binding. If this were truly the case, why even bother releasing the new, more expensive books in the superior "hardcover" binding? Consumers would be perfectly happy to shell out $20 for the paperback (trade paperbacks these days do seem to command hardcover prices...which has sometimes prompted me to buy 1st ed. hardcovers "used" instead...) if that theory were true; in general they are not.
Thus, I suspect that though the publishers (except for Baen, which has, incidentally, managed to find a way to legitimately justify the $15 price discrimination "premium" ebook markup--eARCs! Brilliant!) seem to be winning this skirmish, the ebook war is far from over. If they intend to turn ebooks into a substantial part of their future revenues, demanding that customers purchase $15 novels that will disappear along with their Kindles is not going to be a long-term successful business strategy. Whether it stems from simple emotional reactions or not (purchase decisions generally seem to be extremely emotional, though the case for an objectively reduced value here seems pretty sound), the average consumer is not yet anywhere near the point where he will value a kindle ebook equally with a hardcover. As ebooks catch on, DRM or not, they will undoubtedly change traditional publishing models: the size of printing runs and finicky chain-bookstore buyers will no longer be relevant to publisher economics, as increased authorial royalty percentages in ebook contracts are already reflecting.
Stross' argument that the increased cost of DRM swamp out its values in reduced piracy might well be correct; his specific claim that this is because of actual marginal costs of DRM are laughable. The "cost" of DRM is in perceived customer value, and Baen and Amazon's ebook experiments will provide evidence one way or the other. Like too many science fiction authors (particularly, cough, ones in technologically avant-garde Baen's stable), he apparently believes that the fact that he is writing in a speculative genre excuses him from doing solid research. I could write a few (hundred) pages on that lamentable subject, but perhaps this comment is long enough already...
The ACLU is a member too; I cannot believe that they would support something inimical to liberty. As for the suspicious number, it is clear that the website is just using unique and ostensibly random GUID-style static links for all of their pages to avoid the bother of naming them.