You're assuming that the death was a suicide. The OP says that the reason for looking through the accounts is to find out whether the death was a suicide or an accident.
1) Grant an amnesty to civilian or military interrogators who prior to January 20, 2009 used "enhanced interrogation techniques" which they reasonably, if falsely, believed to be legal.
2) Order the declassification and publication of the classified portion of the US Army Field Manual on Interrogation.
3) If waterboarding is authorized in the classified portion of the Field Manual, de-authorize it.
4) Announce that if any U.S. military or civilian interrogator uses a harsh interrogation technique not authorized in the Field Manual, that interrogator will be prosecuted. If the prosecution cannot be carried out in American courts for lack of jurisdiction, the U.S. Government will actively cooperate with a foreign government's prosecution of the offense.
5) Select an Attorney General who pledges to pursue such cases aggressively. Order military prosecutors to pursue such cases aggressively.
6) Order the military to stop holding detainees as "unlawful combatants" at Guantanomo or other prisons. Anyone currently held as an "unlawful combatant" must be either designated as a prisoner of war, transferred to civilian custody for prosecution in U.S. or foreign courts, or released.
This is a good point. If a program is released as free software and
the source is extensive and hard to read, then it's possible but very
costly for users to modify it. For most people, making a change will involve either (a) getting
someone on the original development team to make the change or (b) hiring
programmers who weren't on the original development team to spend a lot
of time studying the code. If you don't have either a lot of money
or a lot of time and programming skill, then the original developers
of the program effectively have a monopoly on improvement of the code. So
much for Stallman's Freedom Three.
Contrast GNU Emacs. It's designed to be
easily modified. There is
a tutorial available on how to modify Emacs. There is also a
wiki for people to share modifications of Emacs without asking
the developers to add the changes to an official release.
If free software developers are seriously concerned about their users' ability
to modify the code, they should think carefully about how to do this when developing
the programs (e.g., documenting the code, using Guile or another extension language).
I had my ID scanned the other night at the Abbey, a large and popular gay
bar in West Hollywood (Los Angeles County). I've been there several times before,
and this is the first time they've had an ID scanner.
It would be especially creepy for a gay bar to keep a database of its
customers' personal information. I'm 100% out, but not
everyone who goes to gay bars is. Some people at the bars are out to their
gay friends but not their straight friends, or they're out in their social life
but not at work. Many such people would be frightened to find out that their
name is stored in a database of people who've been to a gay bar or club.
So I really hope you're right that the ID scanners they use at California
bars and clubs aren't recording information.
When John Rawls discovered that many of his students were trying to take down his lectures word for word, he started offering copies of his lecture notes for forty cents. This was in 1977. The 1991 edition of his lectures is now available as a book.
I've found that more often than not, professors lecture almost verbatim from either a set of detailed, easily readable notes, or from a book - often one that they wrote or collaborated on.
What field(s) were you studying? Were your classes all in math, CS, and hard science? Things are different in the humanities. I'd want a math professor to be reading proofs verbatim from notes. I wouldn't necessarily want a philosophy professor, say, to be reading verbatim from notes. Some do, of course, and some of them give very good lectures this way. But it's also possible for a good extemporaneous speaker to give a good humanities lecture from an outline.
The worst professors I had were the few who DID produce lectures without notes as a fixed reference point. Why? Because the material on their tests generally came from a book and had little relevance to the lectures.
I hope you don't believe that the only purpose of college lectures is to prepare students to take exams.
Interesting point. It hadn't occurred to me that there might be a big difference between CS and other disciplines.
I never had any CS courses in college. I had courses in math, physics, philosophy, religion, psychology, economics, history, music, and literature. None of the professors gave out lecture notes. (There was one graduate student who gave out lecture notes for the cryptography course he taught.) But CS, I suppose, is a different world.
This system sounds at least a little bit unfair to those students who are in tight financial circumstances. If recorded lectures are available for a fee (even a nominal fee), then students with money to burn have an advantage over students who have to pinch pennies.
Unless a professor is a crappy lecturer, they presumably have lecture notes/slides.
Some lecturers are talented at extemporaneous speaking and can give good lectures without notes.
Many lecturers have notes that are only intelligible to them. Producing a set of notes that others
can understand is a lot more work than producing notes you can understand.
The professor isn't providing lecture notes for a fee. He's providing recordings of the lectures.
The U.K. educational system is apparently quite different from the system in the U.S. At the two universities I've studied at, only a few professors provide lecture outlines, and none that I know of provide full lecture notes. If you miss a lecture, it's your responsibility to get notes from another student. In the U.S., providing lecture notes is not part of a professor's job description.
Taking notes is an important skill. If you try to write down everything, you're going to get lost. You need to learn how to figure out what's important to write down and what's not.
There were forty-nine people in the trial, and the trial started less than two years ago. The article didn't say that the volunteers were from high risk groups. In two years, what's the likelihood that even one out of forty-nine randomly selected Chinese citizens between 18 and 50 will get HIV? I can't imagine it's high enough for us to conclude anything from the fact that none of the volunteers became infected with HIV during the study.
Zhang Wei claims that the volunteers "appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection." What's his evidence?
It must be hard to return to graduate school after you've been making six figures. The job I left was in government...'nuff said.
Good luck with your program!
I'm in a Ph.D. program in the humanities. I worked for two years between college and graduate school, and I'm very glad that I did.
When I was in my senior year of college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Here are some of the things I considered: doctoral study in any of several fields, law school, management consulting, high school teaching, the clergy, working in the non-profit world, working in government. I was in no position to commit to a seven year Ph.D. program that would prepare me for only one job--or to a three year law program that would leave me with a pile of debt.
So I found a job working for the government in Washington, D.C. and stayed there for two years. A year and a half out of college, it became clear to me that I really wanted to be in academia. Taking time away from school was necessary for me to make a mature decision. It also gave me the chance to see what the "real world" is like and to spend some time in a fun city. (Washington is a great place to be if you're right out of college.)
I don't feel that two years away from school hampered my academic ability at all. Maybe things are different in math. I hear that mathematicians tend to produce their best work at a young age. If that's true, there's an advantage to being in graduate school early. (In my field, people tend to do their best work at least a bit later in life.) I also don't know how graduate admissions committees look at people who take time away from school. Clearly it's not seen as a problem in my department, but maybe the sciences are different. Some professional schools (law, business) prefer students who have work experience.
I know nobody who's regretted taking time to work before going to graduate school. I also know nobody who had concrete plans to go to graduate school, took time off to work, and never followed through on the educational plans. (To be fair, I also don't know anybody who was planning to go to math grad school, in particular.) I know lots of people--lawyers and law students, mostly--who regret going straight from college to a graduate or professional program.
I'm sure that for some people, going straight to graduate school is the right decision. For instance, it's probably a good idea if you know that you want the degree, but you hate school and want to get it over with. Or if you're planning to start a family as soon as possible, and you don't want to do that while you're still a student. But for a lot of people, taking time between college and graduate school is the way to go.
This loan money is money you're going to need to repay in a fairly short time, right? The stock market is volatile. When you need the money a year or two years from now, the stock market could be way up from where it is now. It could also be down--possibly by 25% or more. And that's just the market indices. If you invest in individual stocks, rather than index funds or other diversified mutual funds, your investment's value could fluctuate even more.
Better options:
A high-interest savings account
A money-market fund at a major brokerage (keep in mind that these are not FDIC-insured)
Six-month Treasury bills or a two-year Treasury note. You can buy them directly from the government at Treasury Direct
Pay back the loan
Finally: have you thought about the ethics of using your student loans in this way? Were the loans given to you in order to help you pay for your expenses as a student? Do you think it's okay to ask someone to loan you money for one thing and then use that money for something else? Isn't that a form of lying?
I started a humanities Ph.D. program after two years working for a government law office.
I've spoken with many graduate students, law students, and lawyers who took time off between
college and graduate school. None of them regretted taking time between college and grad
school. Many of the lawyers and law students I know who went straight to law school wish
they had worked first.
Some reasons to work before graduate school:
Some college students go to graduate school or law school because they don't really
know what they want to do and graduate school seems like a good next step. These students
often don't have a clear idea of why they're going to graduate school. If you've
taken time to work before you make the decision to apply to graduate school, you'll
have a clearer idea of why you're going.
After you've spent a year or two or more paying your own bills, you'll feel more confident
and more like an adult. This is especially useful if you'll be TA-ing. At the public university
I attend, I often teach students who are quite a bit older than me. It's awkward to give
low grades or criticism to people who are older than you and have had careers. I imagine it's even
harder if you've just a year out of college.
Law students who've worked before law school tell me that their work experience gives
them a clearer idea of what's important for them to know and what's not important.
When I was deciding whether to apply to humanities Ph.D. programs, I got the
same advice from several professors. Ask yourself: if you spend seven years in
graduate school and end up unable to get a job in your field of study, will
you feel that you had wasted seven years of your life? If the answer is yes,
don't go.
This is particularly good advice for graduate school in the humanities, because
there are plenty of bright, hard-working humanities Ph.D.s who never manage
to get tenure-track jobs. Going into graduate school, you don't really know
what your talents are, whether you'll thrive in the department you've chosen,
or what the job market is going to be like several years down the road.
But I think this is good advice for Ph.D. students in other fields
too. If graduate study is merely a means to a future job, not an activity
you value for its own sake, do you really think you're going to be able to finish
a dissertation without going insane? On the other hand, if you value your field of study for its own
sake and find it enjoyable then graduate school can be
immensely rewarding.
Why did the Free State project pick New Hampshire and not Vermont? Is it
mainly because of the distance from Boston?
Vermont's already doing pretty well, by libertarian standards. It's the only
state where you can have a civil union with a member of the same sex and
carry a concealed weapon without a permit.
I suspect that there's a miscommunication going on here. When you say that "they prosecute these things," do you mean ignoring reset packets in order to get access to private information on a networked computer? Or do you mean ignoring reset packets in order to circumvent government censorship and get access to a public web site?
Of course, it's illegal to circumvent security measures in order to get access to a computer when the computer's owner doesn't want you to access it. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. But that's not the case we're discussing. The case we're discussing is one in which the "security measure" is imposed by a government to prevent people from accessing a public web site.
Care to tell us which U.S. statute is violated by "a modification of network behavior designed to circumvent security measures?" I don't see any such language in 18 U.S.C. 1030.
Remember, if you circumvent this "security measure" to a server with censored content, you're not accessing that computer without its owner's authorization. The owner of that server would be delighted for you to access the information she's published. So, you're not accessing a computer without authorization, and so no violation of 1030(a)(2).
There's no violation of 1030(a)(5) either. Even if ignoring the packet somehow causes "damage" to the censor's computer, you're not causing damage by "knowingly caus[ing] the transmission of a program, information, code, or command." Ignoring a packet is not transmitting a packet.
Furthermore, "damage" is defined as "impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information" 1030(e)(8). The censor's computer is, on this definition, causing damage. By circumventing the censorship, you're preventing damage. How is that illegal?
Why do you think that the only legitimate way to deal with a bad government is to overthrow it, by election or force? What's wrong with getting a bad government to change its ways?
Do you think that any time a government is doing something bad, that the government should be overthrown (or voted out)? What if a government is doing some really wrong things, but it's also doing some good things? Suppose you think that a President has done one thing that's very wrong, but that aside from that one thing, he's done a fantastic job. Are you morally obliged to vote that President out? Imagine it's 1948. You think Truman did a terrible thing when he used nuclear weapons in Japan, but you approve of everything else he's done, and you don't like Dewey. Are you morally required to vote for Dewey anyway?
Do you think that armed rebellion is the only way for a non-democratic government to become democratic? If so, why do you think this? There are examples in recent history of non-democratic governments becoming democratic without a shot being fired (e.g., most of Eastern Europe). Or think about the way the U.K. changed from a non-democratic monarchy to a parliamentary democracy with a figurehead monarch.
Have you thought about what would be involved in overthrowing China's government by force? For some period of time, China would be without any government at all. Think how wonderful it would be for a country with a population of over a billion and a large supply of nuclear weapons to find itself suddenly without a government.
One way to get a government to stop trying to regulate something is to make its efforts to regulate it spectacularly ineffective. This happened in the United States with Prohibition. Why can't it happen in China?
I did read the page, but I found it unhelfpul. "Not all movies play successfully" isn't all that specific. Are we talking about a few movies here and there not working? Or is "Not all movies play successfully" code for "A large majority of Flash 7 files currently available on the web do not work?"
At the beginning of the interview, RMS talks about the top priorities for GNU programmers. He remarks, "Flash was a high priority, but it's mostly done." Is this true? Is gnash close to being a usable Flash player?
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming that the death was a suicide. The OP says that the reason for looking through the accounts is to find out whether the death was a suicide or an accident.
1) Grant an amnesty to civilian or military interrogators who prior to January 20, 2009 used "enhanced interrogation techniques" which they reasonably, if falsely, believed to be legal.
2) Order the declassification and publication of the classified portion of the US Army Field Manual on Interrogation.
3) If waterboarding is authorized in the classified portion of the Field Manual, de-authorize it.
4) Announce that if any U.S. military or civilian interrogator uses a harsh interrogation technique not authorized in the Field Manual, that interrogator will be prosecuted. If the prosecution cannot be carried out in American courts for lack of jurisdiction, the U.S. Government will actively cooperate with a foreign government's prosecution of the offense.
5) Select an Attorney General who pledges to pursue such cases aggressively. Order military prosecutors to pursue such cases aggressively.
6) Order the military to stop holding detainees as "unlawful combatants" at Guantanomo or other prisons. Anyone currently held as an "unlawful combatant" must be either designated as a prisoner of war, transferred to civilian custody for prosecution in U.S. or foreign courts, or released.
This is a good point. If a program is released as free software and the source is extensive and hard to read, then it's possible but very costly for users to modify it. For most people, making a change will involve either (a) getting someone on the original development team to make the change or (b) hiring programmers who weren't on the original development team to spend a lot of time studying the code. If you don't have either a lot of money or a lot of time and programming skill, then the original developers of the program effectively have a monopoly on improvement of the code. So much for Stallman's Freedom Three.
Contrast GNU Emacs. It's designed to be easily modified. There is a tutorial available on how to modify Emacs. There is also a wiki for people to share modifications of Emacs without asking the developers to add the changes to an official release.
If free software developers are seriously concerned about their users' ability to modify the code, they should think carefully about how to do this when developing the programs (e.g., documenting the code, using Guile or another extension language).
I had my ID scanned the other night at the Abbey, a large and popular gay bar in West Hollywood (Los Angeles County). I've been there several times before, and this is the first time they've had an ID scanner.
It would be especially creepy for a gay bar to keep a database of its customers' personal information. I'm 100% out, but not everyone who goes to gay bars is. Some people at the bars are out to their gay friends but not their straight friends, or they're out in their social life but not at work. Many such people would be frightened to find out that their name is stored in a database of people who've been to a gay bar or club.
So I really hope you're right that the ID scanners they use at California bars and clubs aren't recording information.
When John Rawls discovered that many of his students were trying to take down his lectures word for word, he started offering copies of his lecture notes for forty cents. This was in 1977. The 1991 edition of his lectures is now available as a book.
I've found that more often than not, professors lecture almost verbatim from either a set of detailed, easily readable notes, or from a book - often one that they wrote or collaborated on.
What field(s) were you studying? Were your classes all in math, CS, and hard science? Things are different in the humanities. I'd want a math professor to be reading proofs verbatim from notes. I wouldn't necessarily want a philosophy professor, say, to be reading verbatim from notes. Some do, of course, and some of them give very good lectures this way. But it's also possible for a good extemporaneous speaker to give a good humanities lecture from an outline.
The worst professors I had were the few who DID produce lectures without notes as a fixed reference point. Why? Because the material on their tests generally came from a book and had little relevance to the lectures.
I hope you don't believe that the only purpose of college lectures is to prepare students to take exams.
Interesting point. It hadn't occurred to me that there might be a big difference between CS and other disciplines.
I never had any CS courses in college. I had courses in math, physics, philosophy, religion, psychology, economics, history, music, and literature. None of the professors gave out lecture notes. (There was one graduate student who gave out lecture notes for the cryptography course he taught.) But CS, I suppose, is a different world.
This system sounds at least a little bit unfair to those students who are in tight financial circumstances. If recorded lectures are available for a fee (even a nominal fee), then students with money to burn have an advantage over students who have to pinch pennies.
Unless a professor is a crappy lecturer, they presumably have lecture notes/slides.
Some lecturers are talented at extemporaneous speaking and can give good lectures without notes. Many lecturers have notes that are only intelligible to them. Producing a set of notes that others can understand is a lot more work than producing notes you can understand.
The professor isn't providing lecture notes for a fee. He's providing recordings of the lectures.
The U.K. educational system is apparently quite different from the system in the U.S. At the two universities I've studied at, only a few professors provide lecture outlines, and none that I know of provide full lecture notes. If you miss a lecture, it's your responsibility to get notes from another student. In the U.S., providing lecture notes is not part of a professor's job description.
Taking notes is an important skill. If you try to write down everything, you're going to get lost. You need to learn how to figure out what's important to write down and what's not.
The Slate article in question is here.
...ed! It's the standard text editor!
It's not an IDE, you say? Bah! Ed can run shell commands, right?
There were forty-nine people in the trial, and the trial started less than two years ago. The article didn't say that the volunteers were from high risk groups. In two years, what's the likelihood that even one out of forty-nine randomly selected Chinese citizens between 18 and 50 will get HIV? I can't imagine it's high enough for us to conclude anything from the fact that none of the volunteers became infected with HIV during the study.
Zhang Wei claims that the volunteers "appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection." What's his evidence?
It must be hard to return to graduate school after you've been making six figures. The job I left was in government...'nuff said. Good luck with your program!
I'm in a Ph.D. program in the humanities. I worked for two years between college and graduate school, and I'm very glad that I did.
When I was in my senior year of college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Here are some of the things I considered: doctoral study in any of several fields, law school, management consulting, high school teaching, the clergy, working in the non-profit world, working in government. I was in no position to commit to a seven year Ph.D. program that would prepare me for only one job--or to a three year law program that would leave me with a pile of debt.
So I found a job working for the government in Washington, D.C. and stayed there for two years. A year and a half out of college, it became clear to me that I really wanted to be in academia. Taking time away from school was necessary for me to make a mature decision. It also gave me the chance to see what the "real world" is like and to spend some time in a fun city. (Washington is a great place to be if you're right out of college.)
I don't feel that two years away from school hampered my academic ability at all. Maybe things are different in math. I hear that mathematicians tend to produce their best work at a young age. If that's true, there's an advantage to being in graduate school early. (In my field, people tend to do their best work at least a bit later in life.) I also don't know how graduate admissions committees look at people who take time away from school. Clearly it's not seen as a problem in my department, but maybe the sciences are different. Some professional schools (law, business) prefer students who have work experience.
I know nobody who's regretted taking time to work before going to graduate school. I also know nobody who had concrete plans to go to graduate school, took time off to work, and never followed through on the educational plans. (To be fair, I also don't know anybody who was planning to go to math grad school, in particular.) I know lots of people--lawyers and law students, mostly--who regret going straight from college to a graduate or professional program.
I'm sure that for some people, going straight to graduate school is the right decision. For instance, it's probably a good idea if you know that you want the degree, but you hate school and want to get it over with. Or if you're planning to start a family as soon as possible, and you don't want to do that while you're still a student. But for a lot of people, taking time between college and graduate school is the way to go.
This loan money is money you're going to need to repay in a fairly short time, right? The stock market is volatile. When you need the money a year or two years from now, the stock market could be way up from where it is now. It could also be down--possibly by 25% or more. And that's just the market indices. If you invest in individual stocks, rather than index funds or other diversified mutual funds, your investment's value could fluctuate even more.
Better options:
Finally: have you thought about the ethics of using your student loans in this way? Were the loans given to you in order to help you pay for your expenses as a student? Do you think it's okay to ask someone to loan you money for one thing and then use that money for something else? Isn't that a form of lying?
I started a humanities Ph.D. program after two years working for a government law office. I've spoken with many graduate students, law students, and lawyers who took time off between college and graduate school. None of them regretted taking time between college and grad school. Many of the lawyers and law students I know who went straight to law school wish they had worked first.
Some reasons to work before graduate school:
When I was deciding whether to apply to humanities Ph.D. programs, I got the same advice from several professors. Ask yourself: if you spend seven years in graduate school and end up unable to get a job in your field of study, will you feel that you had wasted seven years of your life? If the answer is yes, don't go.
This is particularly good advice for graduate school in the humanities, because there are plenty of bright, hard-working humanities Ph.D.s who never manage to get tenure-track jobs. Going into graduate school, you don't really know what your talents are, whether you'll thrive in the department you've chosen, or what the job market is going to be like several years down the road.
But I think this is good advice for Ph.D. students in other fields too. If graduate study is merely a means to a future job, not an activity you value for its own sake, do you really think you're going to be able to finish a dissertation without going insane? On the other hand, if you value your field of study for its own sake and find it enjoyable then graduate school can be immensely rewarding.
Why did the Free State project pick New Hampshire and not Vermont? Is it mainly because of the distance from Boston?
Vermont's already doing pretty well, by libertarian standards. It's the only state where you can have a civil union with a member of the same sex and carry a concealed weapon without a permit.
Which English guy is this? Show me a link.
I suspect that there's a miscommunication going on here. When you say that "they prosecute these things," do you mean ignoring reset packets in order to get access to private information on a networked computer? Or do you mean ignoring reset packets in order to circumvent government censorship and get access to a public web site?
Of course, it's illegal to circumvent security measures in order to get access to a computer when the computer's owner doesn't want you to access it. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. But that's not the case we're discussing. The case we're discussing is one in which the "security measure" is imposed by a government to prevent people from accessing a public web site.
Care to tell us which U.S. statute is violated by "a modification of network behavior designed to circumvent security measures?" I don't see any such language in 18 U.S.C. 1030.
Remember, if you circumvent this "security measure" to a server with censored content, you're not accessing that computer without its owner's authorization. The owner of that server would be delighted for you to access the information she's published. So, you're not accessing a computer without authorization, and so no violation of 1030(a)(2).
There's no violation of 1030(a)(5) either. Even if ignoring the packet somehow causes "damage" to the censor's computer, you're not causing damage by "knowingly caus[ing] the transmission of a program, information, code, or command." Ignoring a packet is not transmitting a packet.
Furthermore, "damage" is defined as "impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information" 1030(e)(8). The censor's computer is, on this definition, causing damage. By circumventing the censorship, you're preventing damage. How is that illegal?
Why do you think that the only legitimate way to deal with a bad government is to overthrow it, by election or force? What's wrong with getting a bad government to change its ways?
Do you think that any time a government is doing something bad, that the government should be overthrown (or voted out)? What if a government is doing some really wrong things, but it's also doing some good things? Suppose you think that a President has done one thing that's very wrong, but that aside from that one thing, he's done a fantastic job. Are you morally obliged to vote that President out? Imagine it's 1948. You think Truman did a terrible thing when he used nuclear weapons in Japan, but you approve of everything else he's done, and you don't like Dewey. Are you morally required to vote for Dewey anyway?
Do you think that armed rebellion is the only way for a non-democratic government to become democratic? If so, why do you think this? There are examples in recent history of non-democratic governments becoming democratic without a shot being fired (e.g., most of Eastern Europe). Or think about the way the U.K. changed from a non-democratic monarchy to a parliamentary democracy with a figurehead monarch.
Have you thought about what would be involved in overthrowing China's government by force? For some period of time, China would be without any government at all. Think how wonderful it would be for a country with a population of over a billion and a large supply of nuclear weapons to find itself suddenly without a government.
One way to get a government to stop trying to regulate something is to make its efforts to regulate it spectacularly ineffective. This happened in the United States with Prohibition. Why can't it happen in China?
I did read the page, but I found it unhelfpul. "Not all movies play successfully" isn't all that specific. Are we talking about a few movies here and there not working? Or is "Not all movies play successfully" code for "A large majority of Flash 7 files currently available on the web do not work?"
At the beginning of the interview, RMS talks about the top priorities for GNU programmers. He remarks, "Flash was a high priority, but it's mostly done." Is this true? Is gnash close to being a usable Flash player?