Any old miracle will do. Why be choosy? If it works, why not use it?
It would be interesting to see a rigorous statistical study of this effort, comparing those locations to a comparable period picked from locations that, prior to the experiment, has similar characteristics, to see if there is a significant difference. Pseudoscience, or placebo effect? How do you tell? Let the numbers decide.
As I understand it, the speaker was NOT just talking about the USSS, but about law enforcement in general. And given so many violations of individual privacy by various branches of law enforcement (e.g., border searches of laptops and other egregious intrusions going back to and beyond the Steve Jackson case), nobody is crying for them. There has just been too much abuse by the law enforcement community for the tech community to garner much sympathy for any of them, even if they might deserve it in individual instances.
Come to think of it, wasn't the USSS INVOLVED in the Jackson case?
The reason that Texas has so much clout is that the State of Texas (or its school boards, under state supervision) actually BUYS the textbooks and issues them to the students throughout the state for use during the academic year. Perhaps if other states set similar standards and were similarly active in actually putting their money where their mouths are, they would be able to overcome the unique position that Texas finds itself in. It's one thing to bitch about how Texas chooses to make their educational decisions; it's quite another to actually put up or shut up when it comes to laying out actual state dollars to provide the children of the state with their textbooks.
Something haunting reminiscent about the Steve Jackson case about this. The government doesn't seem to want certain information to get out, regardless of its validity.
By the way, street rumor has it that the original 1971 work has long since been heavily "improved" courtesy of the CIA and/or others in the government, and that reprints since the mid-70's have not been reliable.
Even the college curriculum is getting weaker all the time. I teach statistics, and a couple of years ago the program director I worked for told me point blank that it was not important that my students know what the variance or standard deviation of a distribution weere; what was important was that they get grades good enough that they got reimbursed by their employers so they would stay in school and eventually qualify for the school's masters degree program.
The math program throughout our undergraduate program is slipping. A few years ago, candidates for all four-year degrees had to have basic algebra (the equivalent of a high school freshman course) plus one "liberal arts math" course beyond that. Now that requirement has been dropped. Most degrees no longer require that additional course, and some no longer even require algebra.
The "left wing" has recently shown themselves (in cases like Jewel v. NSA, for example) to be even worse than their "right-wing" predecessors in attacking rights to individual privacy in electronic communications. There's no help there. Apparently there ARE no American mainstream politicians who actually believe that freedom of speech should be part of our fundamental rights in the 21st century.
Don't know where (or IF) he went to business school, but somewhere along the line in almost every program I've heard of there was a "pretend-business" game of some sort that students had to play for the term. The key to ours was to notice that your company could borrow long-term funds very cheaply, and loan them out at a somewhat higher rate of interest, and that this represented the best profit opportunity in the game, as interest rates were fixed. Most others I've seen have been a little more robust.
Being extremely liberal is great. But some days I wish the UK had a little more of the things American conservatives love (e.g. Personal Freedom, less interference).
On the other hand, my home security system has a real-time camera that will send pictures to my cell phone (or to my security company, if I choose) if anybody DOES try to break into my house while I'm gone. And yes, it DOES have substantial battery backup AND its own cell phone link, so cutting the wires to my house will NOT help the burglars one bit. Technology giveth as well as taketh away.
Maybe now. Back in about 2003 I used it, and one day when I logged on to my Mac, I got a message telling me that the file was not a valid FileVault file. To make a VERY long story short, ALL attempts (yes, I had AppleCare) to recover the data in that vault failed utterly, so my data record today goes back no further than 2003 for most things (except a few old files that I've found on ancient floppy disks from waaaaaayyyy back when, before the advent of hard drives). Among the things I lost were the "upgradeable" copies of Photoshop and Illustrator (which my late wife had used since they first came out), and the original boxes had been lost in an interstate move the year before. So I no longer have those software packages. Thanks a lot, Apple.
I'm afraid that WE are starting to learn more and more about that style of government from them, instead of the other way around. Our government now has the unsupervised ability, in effect, to listen in on anything it wants to (so long, wiretap oversight, Jewel v. NSA did away with YOU), and private companies can have just about anything taken down from the internet just by sending a letter to another company claiming (without having to present any proof, ever, to anyone, in most cases) ownership of the content.
We're TALKING about the federal government here... rules being set by the FCC. "F" as in "Federal". They should be required to adhere to the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech.
According to the article (http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=121884),
"He clarifies he is not arguing the government should be free to regulate broadcasting however it chooses.
"Regulation designed to eliminate a particular viewpoint would of course be out of bounds. All viewpoint discrimination would be banned," Sunstein writes. "
So all viewpoint discrimination would be out of bounds. Except that the government could disrupt people promulgating rumors that high government officials were responsible for some coverup or other. Like maybe that the White House was behind a break-in at a hotel room used by political rivals. Certainly THAT should have been suppressed by the government and nobody should have been allowed to print it or talk about it.
I'm very much afraid that in many respects the Obama administration is turning out to be a severe disappointment to civil libertarians who had HOPED that they would offer us a respite from things like the Imperial Presidency stance we saw in the past from things like Jewel v. NSA.
In 1973, as a newly hired systems analyst, I suggested in a design meeting that a new major system we were designing use four-character year fields instead of two to prevent future problems. It drew a laugh. Of course virtually all the laughers were long since retired by the time the company spent tens of millions of dollars retrofitting all those systems with four-digit fields or 60/40 assumption logic (which, by the way, just postponed the "Y2K" problem for another few decades). But we could have saved a LOT of grief by doing it right in the first place.
Actually, in many cases the Obama/Holder justice department is proving to be a greater threat to civil liberties than the Bush administration ever was. And that takes a LOT of doing.
As a Canadian, to all foreign powers who demand we change our laws to match yours, I say fuck you. Get your house in order before you tell us how to get ours in order.
Hope your politicians see things the same way. But politicians as a breed listen to money (especially **AA money) MUCH more closely than they do to their constituents. After all, nobody ever got voted out of office for supporting the **AA line. The voting population just doesn't care enough to act. At least not here in the US, and not anywhere as far as I know.
You take the average gain of the last 30 seconds of a program before it goes to commercial, and don't allow the commercials to be any louder than that.
And if the last 30 seconds is just a slow silent pan around a scene for effect and HAS no sound track?
Actually, in many respects (e.g., Jewel v. NSA) The Obama Justice Department has actually been WORSE from a civil liberties standpoint than was the Bush counterparts. And with several of their top people being former MPAA/RIAA shills, we certainly know how we can expect Justice to weigh in on THOSE issues as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Any old miracle will do. Why be choosy? If it works, why not use it?
It would be interesting to see a rigorous statistical study of this effort, comparing those locations to a comparable period picked from locations that, prior to the experiment, has similar characteristics, to see if there is a significant difference. Pseudoscience, or placebo effect? How do you tell? Let the numbers decide.
As I understand it, the speaker was NOT just talking about the USSS, but about law enforcement in general. And given so many violations of individual privacy by various branches of law enforcement (e.g., border searches of laptops and other egregious intrusions going back to and beyond the Steve Jackson case), nobody is crying for them. There has just been too much abuse by the law enforcement community for the tech community to garner much sympathy for any of them, even if they might deserve it in individual instances.
Come to think of it, wasn't the USSS INVOLVED in the Jackson case?
The reason that Texas has so much clout is that the State of Texas (or its school boards, under state supervision) actually BUYS the textbooks and issues them to the students throughout the state for use during the academic year. Perhaps if other states set similar standards and were similarly active in actually putting their money where their mouths are, they would be able to overcome the unique position that Texas finds itself in. It's one thing to bitch about how Texas chooses to make their educational decisions; it's quite another to actually put up or shut up when it comes to laying out actual state dollars to provide the children of the state with their textbooks.
Something haunting reminiscent about the Steve Jackson case about this. The government doesn't seem to want certain information to get out, regardless of its validity.
By the way, street rumor has it that the original 1971 work has long since been heavily "improved" courtesy of the CIA and/or others in the government, and that reprints since the mid-70's have not been reliable.
Even the college curriculum is getting weaker all the time. I teach statistics, and a couple of years ago the program director I worked for told me point blank that it was not important that my students know what the variance or standard deviation of a distribution weere; what was important was that they get grades good enough that they got reimbursed by their employers so they would stay in school and eventually qualify for the school's masters degree program.
The math program throughout our undergraduate program is slipping. A few years ago, candidates for all four-year degrees had to have basic algebra (the equivalent of a high school freshman course) plus one "liberal arts math" course beyond that. Now that requirement has been dropped. Most degrees no longer require that additional course, and some no longer even require algebra.
Every. Download. Is. A. Lost. Sale. It's an empirically proven fact.
That's because everybody knows that price elasticity of demand does not exist, right?
And by derivation, what others consider their "right wing" are a bunch of flaming leftists, no doubt.
The "left wing" has recently shown themselves (in cases like Jewel v. NSA, for example) to be even worse than their "right-wing" predecessors in attacking rights to individual privacy in electronic communications. There's no help there. Apparently there ARE no American mainstream politicians who actually believe that freedom of speech should be part of our fundamental rights in the 21st century.
Don't know where (or IF) he went to business school, but somewhere along the line in almost every program I've heard of there was a "pretend-business" game of some sort that students had to play for the term. The key to ours was to notice that your company could borrow long-term funds very cheaply, and loan them out at a somewhat higher rate of interest, and that this represented the best profit opportunity in the game, as interest rates were fixed. Most others I've seen have been a little more robust.
- et al
Being extremely liberal is great. But some days I wish the UK had a little more of the things American conservatives love (e.g. Personal Freedom, less interference).
Love, but increasingly do not HAVE.
I still want to know if I can overclock the darned thing for gaming.
But can I overclock it for gaming?
On the other hand, my home security system has a real-time camera that will send pictures to my cell phone (or to my security company, if I choose) if anybody DOES try to break into my house while I'm gone. And yes, it DOES have substantial battery backup AND its own cell phone link, so cutting the wires to my house will NOT help the burglars one bit. Technology giveth as well as taketh away.
"...free of bugs ..."
Maybe now. Back in about 2003 I used it, and one day when I logged on to my Mac, I got a message telling me that the file was not a valid FileVault file. To make a VERY long story short, ALL attempts (yes, I had AppleCare) to recover the data in that vault failed utterly, so my data record today goes back no further than 2003 for most things (except a few old files that I've found on ancient floppy disks from waaaaaayyyy back when, before the advent of hard drives). Among the things I lost were the "upgradeable" copies of Photoshop and Illustrator (which my late wife had used since they first came out), and the original boxes had been lost in an interstate move the year before. So I no longer have those software packages. Thanks a lot, Apple.
One of the differences, perhaps, between an Obama and a Kennedy?
One is science the other is religion. Guess which one does not belong in a schoolbook?
But guess which one GETS into the schoolbook?
I'm afraid that WE are starting to learn more and more about that style of government from them, instead of the other way around. Our government now has the unsupervised ability, in effect, to listen in on anything it wants to (so long, wiretap oversight, Jewel v. NSA did away with YOU), and private companies can have just about anything taken down from the internet just by sending a letter to another company claiming (without having to present any proof, ever, to anyone, in most cases) ownership of the content.
We're TALKING about the federal government here ... rules being set by the FCC. "F" as in "Federal". They should be required to adhere to the constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech.
According to the article (http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=121884),
"He clarifies he is not arguing the government should be free to regulate broadcasting however it chooses.
"Regulation designed to eliminate a particular viewpoint would of course be out of bounds. All viewpoint discrimination would be banned," Sunstein writes. "
So all viewpoint discrimination would be out of bounds. Except that the government could disrupt people promulgating rumors that high government officials were responsible for some coverup or other. Like maybe that the White House was behind a break-in at a hotel room used by political rivals. Certainly THAT should have been suppressed by the government and nobody should have been allowed to print it or talk about it. I'm very much afraid that in many respects the Obama administration is turning out to be a severe disappointment to civil libertarians who had HOPED that they would offer us a respite from things like the Imperial Presidency stance we saw in the past from things like Jewel v. NSA.
In 1973, as a newly hired systems analyst, I suggested in a design meeting that a new major system we were designing use four-character year fields instead of two to prevent future problems. It drew a laugh. Of course virtually all the laughers were long since retired by the time the company spent tens of millions of dollars retrofitting all those systems with four-digit fields or 60/40 assumption logic (which, by the way, just postponed the "Y2K" problem for another few decades). But we could have saved a LOT of grief by doing it right in the first place.
When will Obama be inaugurated?
Actually, in many cases the Obama/Holder justice department is proving to be a greater threat to civil liberties than the Bush administration ever was. And that takes a LOT of doing.
As a Canadian, to all foreign powers who demand we change our laws to match yours, I say fuck you. Get your house in order before you tell us how to get ours in order.
Hope your politicians see things the same way. But politicians as a breed listen to money (especially **AA money) MUCH more closely than they do to their constituents. After all, nobody ever got voted out of office for supporting the **AA line. The voting population just doesn't care enough to act. At least not here in the US, and not anywhere as far as I know.
You take the average gain of the last 30 seconds of a program before it goes to commercial, and don't allow the commercials to be any louder than that.
And if the last 30 seconds is just a slow silent pan around a scene for effect and HAS no sound track?
It's not as easy as it looks.
Actually, in many respects (e.g., Jewel v. NSA) The Obama Justice Department has actually been WORSE from a civil liberties standpoint than was the Bush counterparts. And with several of their top people being former MPAA/RIAA shills, we certainly know how we can expect Justice to weigh in on THOSE issues as well.
Elegant, as one might expect from Apple. But at $99 plus speakers/audio system per room wired, it's not exactly a low-end solution.