No, this is a story about the inclusiveness of the computing profession. The sort of thing that, on Slashdot, attracts a bunch of +5 comments saying "why should anyone care about that?"
TFS is not very clear, but if you read it closely (twice, in my case) it appears these guys are suggesting diverting the money collected from H1-B visa applications into "STEM" (how I hate that acronym) education for poor American kids. That makes a little bit more sense insofar as, if you stand on your head and squint, it looks like a token effort to tax immigration to pay for education in the US.
It's funny how everyone who makes his living on research or advocacy for a particular problem says the solution to that problem is to provide more funding for his organization. That is what TFS appears to be really saying - a bunch of people working on STEM education want more government funding for STEM education. Film at 11.;-)
I don't know how much an H1-B visa fee is, but it must be less than the salary difference between an H1-B guest worker and the actual labor rate set by the domestic market. Otherwise no one would make money off H1-B workers and there would not be this constant clamor for more of them. This small amount of money, collected from a relatively small population of H1-B workers, will never be more than crumbs from the table anyway. It might be enough to fund a dog and pony show like FIRST, but not nearly enough to effect systemic change in the educational system.
In September 2013, the IEEE magazine ran a special series on the STEM "crisis," and based on that, I am now convinced that crisis is nothing more nor less than wishful thinking that high-tech industries can someday, somehow get skilled workers for less than the fair market rate.
And if they change their TOS from "we won't disclose personally identifying information" to "we will disclose to the general public whatever we want, whenever we want," I have no power to stop them doing that with data they have already collected. They already have their data, and I can't take it back. My ceasing to use their services will not change the fact that they obtained my data by making promises that they later decided to break.
To be fair, Google has not done anything like that to my knowledge -- but Facebook has. This is not strictly hypothetical.
I'd be interested to hear the legal argument why a contract whose terms one party can rewrite at any time is enforceable, and remains enforceable after having been rewritten.
I clicked "I agree" once upon a time, when I didn't grasp the implications. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
This idea that every child should get exactly the same education is ludicrous.
You've got that right!
However, I notice that the definition of "success" for a school seems to always be the same regardless of the talent and preparedness of the student population. The schools that have the luxury of admitting the best students are pretty good --- no kidding!
What I think the talk about "failing schools" really indicates is that we are not doing a good job with the kids who can't get into the magnet schools. I'm not sure what the solution to that is -- maybe to set realistic expectations for the non-magnet schools, or maybe to give them more resources. I am pretty sure, though, that putting more effort into magnet schools is not going to help the kids who can't make it into them.
Let me get this straight. In order to use Bitcoins, I don't have to trust any government... but I *do* have to trust a group of random people on the Internet who have a massive stake in the market and say they would never manipulate that market.
That's easy to say but decreasingly effective to do. Why should one have to be a miner in order to ensure the stability of the market? That's an externality most people didn't sign up for.
I don't report to senior executives, so no. But if I did, and they wouldn't listen to my ideas for how to minimize corporate espionage and massive data breaches, I would start looking for a new job where my professional skills were valued.
Senior managers *should* exchange a lot of communication with a lot of people. That creates more opportunities for a mistake. A rational policy would be for the people who most commonly transfer important information to have the best security tools and training.
But nah, let's not educate the executives on how to safely handle critical data, because they should know without being told and it feels so good to laugh at them when they make a mistake.
Given the potential consequences of a nuclear meltdown, perhaps the plan is to start with small-scale experiments and use the findings to inform larger-scale and eventually full-scale trials.
Privacy in America is complicated. The majority argument in the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, Roe v. Wade, was based on a right to privacy. Since then (1973), the Republican Party has refused to accept that a right to privacy exists, because that would imply that Roe v. Wade is based on a sound principle and therefore abortion has to remain legal. This puts us in the unfortunate position of privacy rights being collateral damage in the culture war. Any Federal court nominee is going to get asked in his/her confirmations hearings whether there exists a right to privacy, and an affirmative answer means the Republicans will block that nominee. Most nominees prevaricate.
It's not the only reason privacy is a suppressed issue in mainstream American politics. Both parties have an authoritarian streak a mile wide (manifested in slightly different ways, so they can hate each other anyway) and privacy is the enemy of authority.
A lot will have to change before America is willing to make privacy a priority. What I find encouraging about Snowden's relevations is that it looks like enough people are talking about privacy that the issue might not crawl away to die again. Give it time.
He never said any of this publicly while holding his position because he didn't want to lose his job.
I feel the need to come to Mr. Gates' defense here. Let's put his situation in context: the Secretary of Defense is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of human lives. Gates' predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, had fucked up so egregiously that the United States was on the verge of losing the war in Iraq, and had already wasted thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives through his arrogant blundering.
Somebody had to clean up that mess and make the best of the situation. Gates was the one President Bush picked. If you were in that situation, with hundreds of thousands of lives hanging in the balance and no option that could create peace quickly or with certainty, the future of two countries at stake, wouldn't the responsibility of your position weigh just a teensy bit more heavily on you than where your next paycheck was coming from?
I am not sure I would have the balls to take that job, even if I were competent to do it. Staying on as president of Texas A&M sounds like a much easier career option.
I submit to you that Gates may have wanted to keep his job, not out of pure self-interest, but because he had accepted the duty and felt obligated to see it through.
The short answer is that carelessly written code anywhere in the system can create a vulnerability. A font needs to be loaded into memory, and in this case the code that loads it makes it possible to stick portions of the font into a part of memory where it doesn't belong. So if the "font" is actually a set of data constructed by the attacker, it can include an executable program that runs when the font is loaded.
Back in 1991, the idea that someone would ever want to do this did not enter the imagination of a typical programmer.
isn't it a bit naive to project essays of 30 years ago on today's economy?
Well, I said there was no reason to believe an economic conclusion would always be right everywhere. So of course you have a point, we could already have crossed a threshold to where Simon's model fails.
I don't think we have, but I'm not an economist. I do know that some of the developing countries of the world are experiencing 20% annual GDP growth right now, which is nice to see.
As to energy costs, well, that looks to me like a case of the Jevon's Paradox GGP mentioned.
I also think it's very clear that unbounded population growth would lead to catastrophic problems. However, fertility rates seem to be inversely related to median income, and as second-world and third-world countries develop and become more prosperous, their population growth rates appear to be dropping.
If you care about population growth and the economic implications thereof, I would recommend you check out gapminder.org. That is, of course, only one point of view, and it's smart to check other sources for some balance.
Since when have resources been limited? There may be a fixed amount of arable land in the world, but there is plenty of room to improve crop yields. There are indeed a fixed amount of metals in the earth's crust, but the rate at which we extract and refine them can be increased for the foreseeable future.
I used to believe that population growth would lead to poverty. But then I read in college one essay (not even a whole book) by the economist Julian Simon. The gist of what he said was that more people means more productivity and more exchange of goods and services -- which, according to Adam Smith, is what produces wealth. This made some sense to me: people always strive to produce more than they consume, in order to better their condition.
Simon made a famous wager with Paul Ehrlich (author of _The Population Bomb_ and a famous doomsayer about world population). Essentially, Simon bet that commodity prices would trend downward from 1980-1990 and Ehrlich that they would trend upward. Simon won by an impressive margin.
Economics are always more complicated than single factors, so there are numerous reasons why the principle that more population means more productivity won't apply everywhere and forever. In the recent past, it has borne out -- at least in the developed world.
What concerns us here is the future, and the growing income disparity in the United States is a worrisome indicator of hard times ahead for the middle class. I believe the long term solution is to get the global population to turn a corner and head downward. This is probably going to happen, though when is anybody's guess.
I think the people who hate on Bush, but praise Obama, can point to the fact the Obama never ordered the invasion of a country that had done no harm to America, had no weapons of mass destruction, and was not supporting terrorism. We're talking about the blood of 100,000 civilians give or take. When it comes to morality, George W. Bush's standard is an easy bar to get over.
All that said, Bush never ordered the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen. Obama has done it more than once.
Why does the public let go unchallenged the claim that there will be a "next 9/11" to prevent?
The 9/11 attacks were the most ambitious terrorist attacks in history. They certainly terrorized the United States, and government officials obviously remain terrorized to this day. So in that sense, they were kind of a success. They also had massive blowback that Al Quaeda might not be keen to repeat.
Before 9/11, bin Laden was a folk hero in some parts of the Muslim world because he fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After the atrocity he masterminded, most of his financiers and sympathizers dropped him like he was radioactive. Middle Eastern governments that had formerly turned a blind eye to Al Quaeda started shutting down its finance network and jailing its contributors, raiding training camps and arresting radical clerics. Then there is the US armed response, which was deeply misguided in important ways but which undeniably brought ruin on Al Queada and the Taliban government of Afghanistan. Since at least the battle of Tora Bora, Al Quaeda has been struggling to survive. It's hard to see how redoubling American resolve, just now when the public is war-weary, cynical, and worried about the war debt, would advance the aim of a global Caliphate.
It has also been said that the 9/11 attacks were self defeating in the sense that exactly because they were so devastating and well-planned, they are nigh impossible to surpass. Next to them, just bombing an embassy looks like small time. So the effectiveness of typical terror attacks may actually have been diminished because the public's expectations have been raised.
So, even if any organization could pull off "another 9/11", I seriously question whether they would want to. I believe the radicals' current objective is to get the US out of Afghanistan so they can rebuild their safe haven there. In other words, to pick up the pieces from the blowback from 9/11 and get back to where they were on Sept. 10, 2001. There is considerable doubt whether this is possible: the US will definitely pull out, but its drones will still rain Hellfire missiles from the sky day or night, and the US-backed Afghan army is in a position to keep the pressure on for a good long while.
Which brings me back to why preventing the "next 9/11" is something we should be worried about. If bin Laden had 9/11 to do over again, knowing the consequences for his organization and his agenda, would he go for it? I have to go with "no." Why can't any politician stand up and say that? Claim some credit for the progress in the "war on terror" instead of jumping at shadows?
Of course, I can answer my own question. The bogeyman of terrorism serves the authoritarian purposes of the government, so they refuse to abandon it. But please, let's start calling them on it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this is a story about the inclusiveness of the computing profession. The sort of thing that, on Slashdot, attracts a bunch of +5 comments saying "why should anyone care about that?"
TFS is not very clear, but if you read it closely (twice, in my case) it appears these guys are suggesting diverting the money collected from H1-B visa applications into "STEM" (how I hate that acronym) education for poor American kids. That makes a little bit more sense insofar as, if you stand on your head and squint, it looks like a token effort to tax immigration to pay for education in the US.
It's funny how everyone who makes his living on research or advocacy for a particular problem says the solution to that problem is to provide more funding for his organization. That is what TFS appears to be really saying - a bunch of people working on STEM education want more government funding for STEM education. Film at 11. ;-)
I don't know how much an H1-B visa fee is, but it must be less than the salary difference between an H1-B guest worker and the actual labor rate set by the domestic market. Otherwise no one would make money off H1-B workers and there would not be this constant clamor for more of them. This small amount of money, collected from a relatively small population of H1-B workers, will never be more than crumbs from the table anyway. It might be enough to fund a dog and pony show like FIRST, but not nearly enough to effect systemic change in the educational system.
In September 2013, the IEEE magazine ran a special series on the STEM "crisis," and based on that, I am now convinced that crisis is nothing more nor less than wishful thinking that high-tech industries can someday, somehow get skilled workers for less than the fair market rate.
And if they change their TOS from "we won't disclose personally identifying information" to "we will disclose to the general public whatever we want, whenever we want," I have no power to stop them doing that with data they have already collected. They already have their data, and I can't take it back. My ceasing to use their services will not change the fact that they obtained my data by making promises that they later decided to break.
To be fair, Google has not done anything like that to my knowledge -- but Facebook has. This is not strictly hypothetical.
I'd be interested to hear the legal argument why a contract whose terms one party can rewrite at any time is enforceable, and remains enforceable after having been rewritten.
I clicked "I agree" once upon a time, when I didn't grasp the implications. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
It's not *your* information, it's information *about you.* See the difference?
You've got that right!
However, I notice that the definition of "success" for a school seems to always be the same regardless of the talent and preparedness of the student population. The schools that have the luxury of admitting the best students are pretty good --- no kidding!
What I think the talk about "failing schools" really indicates is that we are not doing a good job with the kids who can't get into the magnet schools. I'm not sure what the solution to that is -- maybe to set realistic expectations for the non-magnet schools, or maybe to give them more resources. I am pretty sure, though, that putting more effort into magnet schools is not going to help the kids who can't make it into them.
Well put!
Let me get this straight. In order to use Bitcoins, I don't have to trust any government ... but I *do* have to trust a group of random people on the Internet who have a massive stake in the market and say they would never manipulate that market.
Choose your poison, I guess.
That's easy to say but decreasingly effective to do. Why should one have to be a miner in order to ensure the stability of the market? That's an externality most people didn't sign up for.
I don't report to senior executives, so no. But if I did, and they wouldn't listen to my ideas for how to minimize corporate espionage and massive data breaches, I would start looking for a new job where my professional skills were valued.
Senior managers *should* exchange a lot of communication with a lot of people. That creates more opportunities for a mistake. A rational policy would be for the people who most commonly transfer important information to have the best security tools and training.
But nah, let's not educate the executives on how to safely handle critical data, because they should know without being told and it feels so good to laugh at them when they make a mistake.
Given the number of obviously fake reviews on Yelp, for it to become as useful as a phone book would be a huge step up.
Given the potential consequences of a nuclear meltdown, perhaps the plan is to start with small-scale experiments and use the findings to inform larger-scale and eventually full-scale trials.
Not quite. I am telling you that because of abortion, no one is willing to stop the NSA putting back doors in software.
Privacy in America is complicated. The majority argument in the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, Roe v. Wade, was based on a right to privacy. Since then (1973), the Republican Party has refused to accept that a right to privacy exists, because that would imply that Roe v. Wade is based on a sound principle and therefore abortion has to remain legal. This puts us in the unfortunate position of privacy rights being collateral damage in the culture war. Any Federal court nominee is going to get asked in his/her confirmations hearings whether there exists a right to privacy, and an affirmative answer means the Republicans will block that nominee. Most nominees prevaricate.
It's not the only reason privacy is a suppressed issue in mainstream American politics. Both parties have an authoritarian streak a mile wide (manifested in slightly different ways, so they can hate each other anyway) and privacy is the enemy of authority.
A lot will have to change before America is willing to make privacy a priority. What I find encouraging about Snowden's relevations is that it looks like enough people are talking about privacy that the issue might not crawl away to die again. Give it time.
I feel the need to come to Mr. Gates' defense here. Let's put his situation in context: the Secretary of Defense is directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of human lives. Gates' predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, had fucked up so egregiously that the United States was on the verge of losing the war in Iraq, and had already wasted thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilian lives through his arrogant blundering.
Somebody had to clean up that mess and make the best of the situation. Gates was the one President Bush picked. If you were in that situation, with hundreds of thousands of lives hanging in the balance and no option that could create peace quickly or with certainty, the future of two countries at stake, wouldn't the responsibility of your position weigh just a teensy bit more heavily on you than where your next paycheck was coming from?
I am not sure I would have the balls to take that job, even if I were competent to do it. Staying on as president of Texas A&M sounds like a much easier career option.
I submit to you that Gates may have wanted to keep his job, not out of pure self-interest, but because he had accepted the duty and felt obligated to see it through.
The short answer is that carelessly written code anywhere in the system can create a vulnerability. A font needs to be loaded into memory, and in this case the code that loads it makes it possible to stick portions of the font into a part of memory where it doesn't belong. So if the "font" is actually a set of data constructed by the attacker, it can include an executable program that runs when the font is loaded.
Back in 1991, the idea that someone would ever want to do this did not enter the imagination of a typical programmer.
Because the last thing the Federal government cares about is the privacy of its citizens.
Well, I said there was no reason to believe an economic conclusion would always be right everywhere. So of course you have a point, we could already have crossed a threshold to where Simon's model fails.
I don't think we have, but I'm not an economist. I do know that some of the developing countries of the world are experiencing 20% annual GDP growth right now, which is nice to see.
As to energy costs, well, that looks to me like a case of the Jevon's Paradox GGP mentioned.
I also think it's very clear that unbounded population growth would lead to catastrophic problems. However, fertility rates seem to be inversely related to median income, and as second-world and third-world countries develop and become more prosperous, their population growth rates appear to be dropping.
If you care about population growth and the economic implications thereof, I would recommend you check out gapminder.org. That is, of course, only one point of view, and it's smart to check other sources for some balance.
Since when have resources been limited? There may be a fixed amount of arable land in the world, but there is plenty of room to improve crop yields. There are indeed a fixed amount of metals in the earth's crust, but the rate at which we extract and refine them can be increased for the foreseeable future.
I used to believe that population growth would lead to poverty. But then I read in college one essay (not even a whole book) by the economist Julian Simon. The gist of what he said was that more people means more productivity and more exchange of goods and services -- which, according to Adam Smith, is what produces wealth. This made some sense to me: people always strive to produce more than they consume, in order to better their condition.
Simon made a famous wager with Paul Ehrlich (author of _The Population Bomb_ and a famous doomsayer about world population). Essentially, Simon bet that commodity prices would trend downward from 1980-1990 and Ehrlich that they would trend upward. Simon won by an impressive margin.
Economics are always more complicated than single factors, so there are numerous reasons why the principle that more population means more productivity won't apply everywhere and forever. In the recent past, it has borne out -- at least in the developed world.
What concerns us here is the future, and the growing income disparity in the United States is a worrisome indicator of hard times ahead for the middle class. I believe the long term solution is to get the global population to turn a corner and head downward. This is probably going to happen, though when is anybody's guess.
I think the people who hate on Bush, but praise Obama, can point to the fact the Obama never ordered the invasion of a country that had done no harm to America, had no weapons of mass destruction, and was not supporting terrorism. We're talking about the blood of 100,000 civilians give or take. When it comes to morality, George W. Bush's standard is an easy bar to get over.
All that said, Bush never ordered the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen. Obama has done it more than once.
I say, put them both on trial.
Why does the public let go unchallenged the claim that there will be a "next 9/11" to prevent?
The 9/11 attacks were the most ambitious terrorist attacks in history. They certainly terrorized the United States, and government officials obviously remain terrorized to this day. So in that sense, they were kind of a success. They also had massive blowback that Al Quaeda might not be keen to repeat.
Before 9/11, bin Laden was a folk hero in some parts of the Muslim world because he fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. After the atrocity he masterminded, most of his financiers and sympathizers dropped him like he was radioactive. Middle Eastern governments that had formerly turned a blind eye to Al Quaeda started shutting down its finance network and jailing its contributors, raiding training camps and arresting radical clerics. Then there is the US armed response, which was deeply misguided in important ways but which undeniably brought ruin on Al Queada and the Taliban government of Afghanistan. Since at least the battle of Tora Bora, Al Quaeda has been struggling to survive. It's hard to see how redoubling American resolve, just now when the public is war-weary, cynical, and worried about the war debt, would advance the aim of a global Caliphate.
It has also been said that the 9/11 attacks were self defeating in the sense that exactly because they were so devastating and well-planned, they are nigh impossible to surpass. Next to them, just bombing an embassy looks like small time. So the effectiveness of typical terror attacks may actually have been diminished because the public's expectations have been raised.
So, even if any organization could pull off "another 9/11", I seriously question whether they would want to. I believe the radicals' current objective is to get the US out of Afghanistan so they can rebuild their safe haven there. In other words, to pick up the pieces from the blowback from 9/11 and get back to where they were on Sept. 10, 2001. There is considerable doubt whether this is possible: the US will definitely pull out, but its drones will still rain Hellfire missiles from the sky day or night, and the US-backed Afghan army is in a position to keep the pressure on for a good long while.
Which brings me back to why preventing the "next 9/11" is something we should be worried about. If bin Laden had 9/11 to do over again, knowing the consequences for his organization and his agenda, would he go for it? I have to go with "no." Why can't any politician stand up and say that? Claim some credit for the progress in the "war on terror" instead of jumping at shadows?
Of course, I can answer my own question. The bogeyman of terrorism serves the authoritarian purposes of the government, so they refuse to abandon it. But please, let's start calling them on it.
There comes a point when cynicism and apathy become mutually reinforcing and, soon, indistinguishable.
I think this is a case where Poe's Law applies.
There's no pleasing some people.